Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard share a bedroom with their kids

Outside of a recommendation for room sharing with your baby for the first year of life, there’s no crystal clear guidance from The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) on how to proceed with sharing a room with your kids once they’re past the baby stage. Many sleep experts state that for everyone to get optimal sleep, having kids sleep in their own bed in their own room is best. And that may work for some families—but not all, Kristen Bell’s included.

Bell recently shared a fact about her kids’ sleeping habits that may be considered somewhat unconventional: She and husband, Dax Shepard, share a bedroom with their two daughters, Lincoln, age 8, and Delta, age 7. 

“In our bedroom, you know, the girls sleep on the floor of our bedroom,” Bell said during the most recent episode of Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast.

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Bell shared that her family enjoys watching How It’s Made together before going to bed, a family ritual that involves the girls sleeping on the floor of their parents’ bedroom, and hey, it seems to be working for them.

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Plenty of child sleep experts won’t outwardly recommend sharing a room or a bed with older kids, and while I’m not a sleep expert, here’s why I, as a parent, think sharing a bedroom with kids works well (at least for my family): It provides a sense of security and safety for little ones and reinforces the sense of physical closeness that so many kids may crave. I’ve found that this is especially true if my kids are at school or with other caretakers throughout the day, away from me and my husband. 

While my own kids do fall asleep in their own beds in the bedroom they share, they both eventually migrate into our family bed at some point in the night. I can’t remember a recent morning when I didn’t wake up to a 3-year-old’s foot firmly planted on my lower back or a 6-year-old’s arm draped across my chest.

And though there’s certainly an argument to be made that we’re all getting less-than-stellar sleep, selfishly, I love every minute of it, even if it means I get less restorative sleep as a result. 

Right now, I’m savoring these moments. I don’t know how long my kids will want to sleep curled up next to us, but there will be room in our family bed for them as long as they want it.

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