How To Get Children To Share Rooms — Joanna Gaines Reveals Her Secrets

While many parents like their children to have their own room, sometimes this just isn’t an option. Whether it’s because of a large family or a small house, there are some tips and tricks to making shared children’s rooms a fairly painless experience. Fixer Upper star Joanna Gaines shares her secrets on how to make shared kids rooms a carefree experience for all involved.

To Joanna and Chip Gaines, the parents of five children, having their children share rooms is nothing new to this family. However, there are ways in which those who are new to the idea can make the transition easier. Or, for those that have children who already share bedrooms, offers some awesome tips to maintain happiness and to help the children feel like they each have their own personal space within the shared environment.

According to Country Living, one of Joanna’s tips includes setting up the shared bedroom with a neutral palette off which the children can work to help create their own identities within the bedroom.

“Your job is just to set the template for them and have fun watching them layer their room,” says Joanna.

However, this doesn’t mean the kids can’t have some fun with color.

“When Emmie and Ella were sharing rooms, Emmie loved blue and Ella loved pink,” Joanna reveals.

So, while a neutral palette is established, there is plenty of room for the children to incorporate their own personality by adding splashes of color, whether it be with their bedding choices or other highlight pieces within the room that can be easily swapped out as the children’s tastes change and evolve.

“Even if it’s just that their bedding is different in that one section — it’s sort of like this is her style and this is her style. It’s just about making sure that their personalities are displayed, so they feel known.”

Creating shared bedrooms also doesn’t mean that the parents get to take over with the color palette either, as Joanna explains further.

“I’ve gotten so much more laid back about kids’ rooms in general because, to me, that’s the space where they want to feel the most creative and the most known,” Joanna says. “And sometimes that means there’s certain things that you wouldn’t pick yourself.”

In addition to color and style choices, storage options are crucial in shared bedrooms involving children.

“Each kid has their own organizational stuff,” Joanna reveals.

“For the boys, they have a lot of the shared stuff, but the baskets under the bed—half are one boy’s and the other half are the others. They have their spot that kind of says ‘this is my stuff,’ and it works for them.”

It is also important that each child feels like they have their very own personal space within each shared bedroom, as Joanna Gaines demonstrates with an Instagram image of her sons’ room.

As the image demonstrates, each child has their own carved out space that they can truly call their own and of which the other child in the room is not allowed to encroach on.

So, there you have it, some great tips from Joanna Gaines that makes shared bedrooms a much easier proposition.