Your baby is finally old enough to have a say in the design and setup of their own room. This is a great opportunity to allow them to apply their creativity and imagination to their own space. It can also be an exercise in trust and appreciation. Your kids already know that you may not have the same taste that they do.
They may think that you will not allow them as much freedom to choose as you would give yourself when decorating. This means that you have a wonderful opportunity to showcase to your children that it is okay to differ and still respect those differences. After all, the innocent whimsy that children bring to everything they do, even decorating a bedroom in garish patterns, is part of the joy of having children.
Your focus must be on directing their ideas into a more coherent and cohesive plan. In addition, you are better aware of the type of materials that would be best for the room of a child. No sharp corners, no freestanding furniture that could topple, termite check and treatment for the room before installing any new wooden furniture, etc. It might also be best if you do give them some limits in the form of how functional the room must be.
Walls
Allow your child a great deal of leeway in decorating their walls. A heavily painted or decorated wall may seem overwhelming to you, but for a child, it serves as a background for their imagination to fly.
If you would prefer something practical, then there is an idea that may appeal to both you and your child. Chalkboard paint can transform a wall into a giant chalkboard. Now your child can freely draw in the walls and have a great time. It will be like a constantly changing work of art every day.
The upper half of the wall they cannot reach is for you to write out their daily schedule, chores list, and any reminders they need to have about school, clothes, sports, etc. Chalkboard walls combine practicality with a lot of fun.
Storage
Laundry baskets and clearly labeled chests of drawers are a great choice for a kid’s room. Chests of drawers tend to be lower to the ground than a closet. This means that your kids will be able to open and close the drawers without help and reach for their clothes by themselves.
Alternatively, you could get a kid-sized closet. These a low to the ground as well and can be anchored to the wall to make them more stable. While a good-sized chest of drawers can last for years and be re-painted to change with your child’s tastes, a kid-sized closet will need to be replaced when they grow older.
The laundry baskets can be of different colors, you can attach pom-poms to them, or sew on characters from your kid’s favorite TV shows. They are a great way to keep your child’s room from getting too cluttered. You can assign a color or character to different meanings. The blue laundry basket could be where they throw in all their toys at the end of the day if they do not feel like carefully placing them back on the shelves.
Another larger laundry basket can be for their clothes, a differently shaped one could be for school uniforms, and so on. It is a good way to teach them organization from an early age.
Toys
A child’s room is going to be a haven for toys. This is a fact, so you might as well find a way to incorporate toys into the decor as well. Fill one wall with frames of different sizes and shapes. Every time your child makes a painting or drawing they feel particularly proud of, you can help them pop it into a frame. Over time, that wall will be a gallery of their art. This will instill a sense of pride and desire to improve their skills in your child.
Cover a wall in floating shelves and little hammocks. These will be where your child can place their toys. Because the shelves display the toys, every new configuration in the way they put away their toys will create a new decorative look. The hammocks will add another dimension to the way they put away their toys. You may even find that the shelves become part of their play as they come to associate simply putting their toys away as a form of fun.
They may want to decorate the whole space as a tribute to their favorite TV show. If you decide to play along, it means you have to accept that a new room overhaul will be needed in a few years. But, it also means that you have to work with their desires to ensure that the purpose of the room is not lost. If your child’s room serves as their playroom or study space as well as their bedroom, then there must be practical pieces of furniture that still match with their theme. For example, a rocket-shaped bed might be too big for the space, but a rocket-shaped mat for their reading corner is just as fun and much less bulky.
Keeping these in mind, begin putting together some ideas so you can help your child to home their many ideas into a cohesive look for their room.
