If you have a baby who is ready to be in their own space, a large well-ventilated walk-in closet or bathroom (if available) will naturally create a more ideal environment than a shared room with siblings. This will also be less disruptive to your older children if your baby is still waking overnight.

If you don’t have the space or you prefer that your siblings share a room together, there are three key strategies to keep in mind to optimize everyone’s sleep.

Create Audible and Visual Barriers if you Share a Room

Siblings can easily fall into the habit of keeping and/or waking each other up while sharing a room together. It can be tough for some kids to settle to sleep while hearing someone else struggle to sleep too. Some kiddos are so sensitive that simply hearing someone else breathing while sleeping can be disruptive. It can be even tougher if a sibling is having a bad dream. All of this can lead to a bit of a dance of “I wake you up; you wake me up”, which can lead to less sleep and poorer quality sleep too.

Babies are also famously loud and active sleepers, which some older siblings might find disruptive. As young babies become older and reach certain milestones, they might interrupt their older siblings’ sleep by standing or sitting repeatedly in their crib. This may not be disruptive at all (or even noticed) if kiddos were in their own rooms.

One way to minimize these disruptions is to create audible and visual barriers between your children’s beds:

• Place beds as far away from each other as possible
• Children with earlier bedtimes should be placed farthest away from the door
• Place noise machines (e.g., like the HoMedics Sound Spa) between beds to create audible barriers
• Use room dividers or curtains (safely) between beds to create visual barriers

Although these will not eliminate all noise and other interruptions, they can greatly help to keep these to a minimum. You can also consider adding area rugs to bedroom floor to help absorb additional noise from inside and outside of the room.

Creating visual barriers between beds also has the added bonus of helping older children to feel as though they have their own personal space inside their room, too.

Stagger Sibling Bedtimes

While siblings share a room, it is usually best to stagger bedtimes if possible. Although it can sound appealing to have all kiddos down for the night at the same time, and while this does work for many families, most families find this to be chaotic and counterproductive. So, unless you have twins who are going to bed at the same time, try to separate bedtimes by at least the amount of time it takes each child to get to sleep.

For example, your younger child takes 20 minutes to fall asleep at a 7 p.m. bedtime, and your older child takes 10 minutes to fall asleep at an 8 p.m. bedtime, which leaves you with some time to spend with your older child during their routine. If bedtimes are approximately the same, but one child takes less time to fall asleep than the other(s), then put that child down first.

Babies do not necessarily have to go down first, since I recommend that their bedtimes are flexible and always based on age-appropriate wake windows.

Although I usually recommend that bedtime routines are completed inside the perfectly sleep-conducive environment, in the case of siblings sharing a room it is better to complete the routine in another quiet, dimly lit environment instead.

If you have a child (or children) who are still napping, it is important for older children to be able to access other living spaces during the day for work or play.

Putting a little bit of focus into planning for separate bedtimes can make a big difference in the amount of time it takes to get all your kiddos down for the night.

Prioritize Healthy Sleep for All Siblings that Share a Room

All of this assumes that your children are generally sleeping well and independently.

If you are struggling through sleep issues with any of your little ones, I highly recommend focusing on improving their sleep first, before placing them into the same room as their siblings. It can be difficult to improve sleep while siblings share a room (for all the reasons previously noted!) and putting them into the same room together may result in their sleeping even more poorly. You may also want to wait until your baby is sleeping throughout the night without waking.

So, always work on any outstanding sleep issues while children are sleeping in separate rooms, even if that means someone is sleeping in your room at first. Then, you can work on optimizing an excellent sleep-conducive environment for siblings to share.

The keys to great sleep for children of all ages include a perfectly sleep-conducive environment, an age-appropriate sleep schedule and bedtime, and a consistent bedtime routine that is predictable and repeated each night before bed. Encouraging children to fall asleep independently at the beginning of the night (at bedtime) is also recommended for the best sleep possible overnight.

If room sharing is new to your children, their sleep might be a bit rough at first as they transition to sleeping together in the same environment. If you stay consistent, this will definitely improve with time, patience and lots of practice.