Is It Weird For a Brother and a Sister to Share a Room?

I wouldn’t have thought so but this article about families in New York sure makes it seem weird:

It’s not a taboo. Or maybe it is.

Parents of opposite-sex children in New York, and other daffy real estate markets, confront what seems to be an impossible equation. The family needs to add a bedroom or subtract a child. The other solution — shared quarters — seems elegant at first, but quickly develops into a high-stakes calculus. The variables include age, gender, family dynamics and personality, and they change over time. What could go wrong, but everything?

There’s a euphemism for this kind of anxiety: ick. To spell it out just a bit, does the mixed-sex bedroom represent an inherent risk to children’s social and sexual development?

Oh the real estate quandaries of having kids of different sexes! I shared a room with my sister on and off growing up, but we didn’t have any brothers so I never encountered this. I can’t imagine having to pay for a three-bedroom apartment in New York just because my kid came out a girl instead of a boy, or vice versa. Oh my god. Put them in the living room! Put yourself in the living room!

Apparently the Census Bureau does not track the gender breakdown of kids sharing a room in New York City, but “of the city’s estimated 471,046 households with 2 children under the age of 18, almost a third had kids sharing a bedroom. And more than 4 percent of the homes had more than 2 children in a bedroom.”

I feel like until you hit puberty sharing a room is fair game, and after that, while not ideal, I’m sure it’s doable. The end of the article interviews a few former brother-sister teens who shared a room until college, which they hated at the time but now feel like it prepared them for sharing a room in college and afterward.

Photo: dweekly

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