Siblings and Room Sharing

https://youtu.be/lVgfPnFz1WY This weeks’ Blog is all about siblings and when they’re room sharing and the effect that that can have on your little one’s sleep including the all important; how you can make this work harmoniously and have siblings that share a room and sleep as well. The first thing I’m going to get you to ask yourself is why, why are your siblings going to room share first of all? Is it because it sounds lovely? It might just be that idea of, I want them to share a room. I would love for them to be together. And if we can make that work, brilliant. But you’ve got to ask yourself whether it’s a nice fantasy idea or whether it’s necessary. In some cases, it’s going to be necessary. It’s going to be a case of there are not enough bedrooms and the siblings have to share. And that’s fine. But if you’re battling with trying to get two siblings to sleep soundly and share a room, just ask yourself, is it worth it right now? And would it be better to actually work on improving their individual sleep in separate rooms until they’re sleeping a little bit better and then bring them together to room share. II think it’s really important to ask yourself a question and just think that through first before we delve into actually conquering sibling room sharing. In the longer term siblings will become quite resilient to each other especially when it comes to noises and sounds, things that might wake them up. Try to bear in mind that what might disturb them in the early days or initially when room sharing, they will get used to it and once they’re in a deep sleep, they’re not going to be disturbed by much at all. It’s only really during light sleep that things, outside noises and things like that can actually wake us and rouse us from sleep. So they will become more used to each other. That will generally happen with time,but there may be a period of going through the pain barrier to get there, at which point until they are used to the noises of their siblings and the room they will wake up a little bit. This is another great time if it’s an option to have them in the same room or separate that you can ask yourself, is it worth that? Is it worth paying the price? Is it worth going through that to get to the outcome? Because ultimately, at some point, if you want them to room share, you’re probably going to have to go through that. Is it costing them precious sleep? Are you pushing them to do this at the cost of having an exhausted child, exhausted family and/or being miserable? Again, if it’s essential and your children as siblings have to share a room and there’s no other way around it, then let’s make that work. So what can you do? Well, one of the most important things you can do, and this doesn’t really matter, whether we’re talking about a young baby or an older child, is to set up some really clear rules and boundaries. When I say that with babies, of course, they don’t necessarily understand the rules or boundaries that you are implementing, but by setting the scene for those, and by having a consistent response to things, they will soon learn. For example, when lights are out and it’s dark, shh, there’s no talking. There’s no voice. It’s just whispers. You can begin to teach them that from baby stage by doing it, by making sure that when lights are out, nobody talks out loud, everything is just a whisper. It becomes nighttime mode and calm, and you can signal this simply by having the lights off. As they then get older from around 20 months, having a sleep wake clock in the room can really, really help. Sleep Wake clocks show when it’s daytime and when it’s nighttime. And when it’s nighttime, we all can comply with nighttime mode. And when it’s daytime, and time to be awake, it’s a good idea to use exaggerated animation in our body language, our voices and our expressions just to really differentiate the two and show a big, clear, significant difference between daytime and nighttime. This also means that