Decorating With Kids

Involving Your Children in Interior Design can Make the Process Easier, and More Fun, for Everyone

Around the house family roles are clearly set out. You work, your kids play. You cook, they eat. You decorate your home and they, well, they just live in it. But don’t get too attached to the way things are. When it comes to remodeling and redecorating your home, your kids can be a great source of ideas for everything from child friendly bathroom decorations to paint schemes for children’s rooms. Your kids can also be an extra pair of (albeit small) hands on projects that aren’t that as physically demanding and don’t involve box cutters or nail guns.

Bringing your children into the process can make the mental and physical work of interior design easier for you, but it can do a lot for them too. When kids realize that their preferences count for something around the house, they’ll feel more confident and be more likely to express themselves creatively. When they know they worked on a room or a piece of children’s furniture, they’re more likely to respect it: if you’re lucky, this will mean fewer messes. Spending a long weekend afternoon together painting personalized kids furniture is also a great bonding activity. There’s really no downside to decorating with your kids when you think about it.

Using Your Children’s Ideas

Before you can start moving furniture you have to know what the room you’re working on is going to look like; kids are especially helpful here. Even young children have taste says remodeling expert and author of The New Kidspace Idea Book , Wendy Jordan. “By the time a child is four or five years old, they have ideas about what they like [in terms of colors and patterns] and what they don’t.”

Getting paint scheme preferences from younger children isn’t just a matter of asking them what color they want the walls to be, Jordan warns. Questions that are too open ended can stump kids. To figure out what color they’d really like, set a few primary color crayons in front of them and ask them to pick their favorite, their second favorite and so on. With school age children you can ask them what sort of patterns they enjoy or ask them to draw a picture of their dream room and take cues from that. With pre-teens and teenagers you can just give them a budget and let them have at it.