Abstract
Over the last hundred years, American vernacular housing has promoted the standard that children ought to have their own bedrooms. Architectural floor plans and house plan books indicate the increasing shift toward houses with plentiful bedrooms. Alongside the architectural evolution came the voices of child-rearing experts, who insisted children benefit psychologically from spatial separation from the rest of the family, even siblings. As the twentieth century progressed, a private bedroom supplied the best opportunity for child privacy, solitude, and development.
Keywords
American vernacular architecture by the end of the twentieth century provided most children with unshared bedrooms, rooms they could claim as their own through most, if not all, of their infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Certainly, there are exceptions to this middle- and upper-class practice. Some families have significantly higher than average number of children, and some reside in densely populated urban areas with expensive housing; in these cases, even families of means cannot supply private rooms. Occasionally, families who have enough space might choose to have children room share. Very poor households, families “doubling up,” households inhabited by nonfamily members, the homeless: they also are less able to provide children with private rooms. Although we cannot know with certainty who would prefer private bedrooms for themselves or their children, the unshared child’s bedroom is so much the standard way of living for most contemporary, middle class that we might consider children without a separate bedroom to be deprived.
This article will trace two, concurrent historical patterns contributing to children’s house privacy. Vernacular American house architecture began in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to intentionally separate residents’ sleeping areas from public, communal areas. Within the sleeping zone, house designers also eventually separated residents, the marital couple earning a bedroom of their own. Eventually, even the children themselves began to occupy different bed chambers. Initially, divisions fell along children’s ages and/or sex, then children got their own private rooms. Dozens of house plan books and catalogues for middle-class, modest houses provide an opportunity to review changing historical patterns in house design, showing a steady march toward an assumption of private bedrooms for children residing even in small dwellings. As house architecture evolved, also occurred a cultural shift that viewed children differently from the past. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, parents were directed to attend to their offspring’s “development” and that included considering the impact of the physical, built environment. Child-rearing experts promoted the idea that teenagers, children, and even infants need private rooms for their physical, psychological, and emotional health. Surveying popular child-rearing and parenting advice manuals indicates a clear message: experts specifically exhorted that children benefit from rooms of their own or they remained silent on the subject. Absent discussions of possible conflicts among room-sharing siblings, even contemporary experts tacitly assume that children do, in practice, occupy their own rooms. By the second half of the twentieth century, the child’s private bedroom became a norm largely unspoken by both home designers and child-rearing experts.
A private bedroom for anyone but the wealthy is a relatively new practice in world history; until the nineteenth century, most American houses were likely to contain one, two, or maybe three rooms. Parents and their children, even servants and extended family slept in the same room, sometimes in the same bed. With only one area designated for sleeping (which may or may not have been separated from the rest of the structure), privacy within a house could be secured only by the most affluent, though even in those households children might share rooms or beds with siblings, grandparents, or even servants. One might enjoy real solitude only when away from home. By the late eighteenth century, however, most households could expect a minimal division between a private sleeping area exclusive to residents and other parts of the house where communal activities like work, food preparation, eating, and receiving of guests would occur. 1 Thus, the first architectural consideration of privacy separated home dwellers from their visitors. Figure 1 displays a spacious, opulent home with ample hallways, but bedrooms are accessible through other bedrooms. Initially, the family needed no separation from each other.
A spacious colonial house built in 1759 for a wealthy family does not have to accommodate fixed bathrooms, and it contains ample hallways. Yet the first-floor chamber/bedroom is connected directly to the drawing room, and each of the five bedrooms on the second floor is connected to another bedroom, with one of those bedrooms only accessible through a bedroom. Bedrooms unreachable except through hallways were clearly not yet the norm. Source: The Editorial Committee of the Great Georgian Houses of America. Great Georgian Houses of America (New York: Kalkhoff Press, 1933), 258.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, technological developments combined with increases in wealth enabled house builders to expand both overall square footage and number of rooms even for middle-class householders, and it is then that a house’s residents began to segregate. More rooms meant each one could have designated purpose: for cooking, for eating, for greeting guests, for sleeping, and so on. Grander houses furnished the most specialized rooms: one for eating breakfast and one for other meals, one for morning guests and one for evening guests, a study for father, and a sewing room for mother. Designated room use also designated the user: Victorian practice restricted children—at least sometimes—from using the “best” rooms, parlors, which were reserved for adults and guests. But even in a segregated house, children had to be somewhere and that is where generationally separate bedrooms came into play. Cromley indicates that once the private bedroom took hold, the marital couple in an eighteenth-century house would have had a room with the greatest proximity to the formal, best space of the house: the parlor. Children were consigned to the back of the house, away from the front entrance. 2 By the late nineteenth century, bourgeois houses divided bedrooms from the rest of the house and noted the difference between what would eventually be called the master bedroom and rooms for children. 3 Thus, a physical separation between parents and children began.
Householders and potential house buyers learned of housing standards by perusing house plan books and catalogs, then the method all but the wealthiest and the poorest Americans used to select a house. These texts communicated the use of rooms a few ways. Primarily, the floor plan itself designated which room is parlor, living room, kitchen, bathroom, or dining room. For sleeping, the floor plans typically used the words “chamber” or “bedroom,” the former word dominating in the Victorian period but eventually shifting toward the twentieth-century standard label of bedroom (occasionally drafters used both terms on the same plan). The other way house designers and architects indicated the purpose for rooms is found in text which sometimes, though not always, accompanied floor plan descriptions. It is through both of these that we can discern which chamber/bedroom is intended for which family member. Nineteenth-century floor plans almost never designate the inhabitant of a bedroom unless that inhabitant is to be a “maid” or “servant.” A label of “master” or “owner” is a rare exception to just “bedroom” or “chamber,” although copy might refer to the “main” or “principal” bedroom.
Yet it is easy to infer which bedroom would be intended for, and likely used by, the marital couple. In most cases, one bedroom is bigger than the other(s). The largest bedroom is also more likely than other rooms to have some additional amenity: an inglenook, 4 alcove, 5 an adjacent sewing room, 6 dressing room, 7 or a balcony. 8 Often, closets—in presence, size, or number—differ from room to room. A middle-priced, two-story, three-bedroom house offered by the Radford Ideal Homes in 1909 includes one bedroom that is slightly larger than the others; it contains the only bedroom closet. 9 Largest bedrooms are by far more likely to have two closets than any of the smaller rooms. 10
Particularly noteworthy is the placement of a small, tandem room next to the most spacious bedroom. 11 Usually, that room is labeled another chamber or bedroom. If we can extrapolate from size and amenities which room would be the “master” bedroom, we might also assume that the small, adjacent room would serve as nursery, child’s room, and/or sickroom. Hopkins’s 1893 plan book makes this specific on the floor plan itself, as the room is labeled “Childs (sic) room or Chamber.” 12 The alcoves, sewing rooms, and dressing rooms, noted above, usually contain enough space for a cradle or crib and often have a window; floor plans sometimes show a broken line separating the alcove, offering the option to partition it by curtain, screen, or wall. Adams’s treatment of Victorian homes shows the need for dedicated space during the “lying-in” as childbirth took place outside a hospital until the turn of the century (when hospitals became safer than homes). 13 A tandem room, like the one shown in Figure 2, could be a retreat for a pregnant woman during her confinement prior to delivery, a site for childbirth, and/or serve as nursery.
Although not a Victorian-style design, this 1912 house design, which was actually erected in Rockford, Illinois, displays the practice of placing a small tandem next to the largest bedroom. Later architectural standards eliminated placing a door between chamber “A” and chamber “B.” Source: H. V. Von Holst, Modern American Homes (Chicago, IL: American Technical Society, 1927), plate 24. (Image embellished to increase legibility).
A marital couple’s occupancy of a “master” bedroom leaves other bedrooms for other occupants, with plan books less instructive about which residents went where. In some larger houses and most of the most expensive ones, rooms for servants are clearly marked (one plan in Hopkins’s 1893 book labels a “girls [sic] room” but as a small room on the back of the second floor it is more likely to be for a servant than a daughter 14 ). Occasionally, a room is labeled for “guest.” Absent direction from drafters and architects, families themselves could choose which family members used which rooms. Stearns et al., in their treatment of shifting sleep philosophy, note that “middle- and upper-class children slept near parent or nurse during infancy.” 15 A many-bedroomed Victorian house, with most or all of the bedrooms on the upper floors, plus some likelihood of a tandem room or alcove off the marital bedroom, facilitated such a practice.
Children, if they shared, shared not with servants (who had their own, designated spaces) or with parents (who had theirs). As early the 1830s, according to Calvert, large-enough houses designated one room as nursery, usually at the back of the house and on the upper floors, though this would be temporarily occupied as once children were old enough they would move into other, ideally unshared, bedrooms. 16 Nineteenth-century floor plans indicate that the smaller the bedroom/chamber, the more likely it would be at the back of the house. In addition, when there is a fixed, second-floor bathroom, it, too, is at the back. If the marital bedroom is at the front of the house, as floor plans indicate and Vollmer et al. confirm, then the children occupied rooms closer to the bathroom than the parents. 17 It certainly makes sense that infants and children young enough to need quick and frequent access to a toilet should play and sleep nearest to the facilities.
New architectural practices facilitating large houses with many rooms grew alongside theories of household hygiene and child development. Domestic science in the latter part of the nineteenth century—spurred by the newly discovered germ theory—turned homes into putative laboratories presided over by the mother/wife/engineer. Home economists shared advice on cooking, cleaning, decorating, and so on, to make the home a hygienic, happy, and moral environment. 18 A medical specialty—pediatrics—soon developed. 19 Focused on stemming infant mortality through better diet and hygiene, child-rearing specialists mandated practices countering decades if not centuries of conventional wisdom, recommending fresh air and sunshine over closed windows and heavy curtains, loose clothing instead of swaddling, and formula over breast milk. Underlying the pediatricians’ cautions were fears about fragile infants. A baby’s susceptibility to illness and disease required a mother to schedule, monitor, weigh, and evaluate every aspect of her infant’s experience, including sleep.
Health concerns pushed advisors to send babies and children packing, first into beds of their own (doctors feared an adult or even older child would accidently smother an infant) and then from the parents’ room altogether. Pediatricians worried not only whether a baby got too much or too little sleep but also its quality. Stearns et al. demonstrate how sleep became a growing American concern at the turn of the century, by the teens and twenties a full-blown worry. The total amount of sleep, spacing of naps and nighttime slumber, the quality of rest: a baby or child deficient of any of these would be at risk of poor physical development and susceptible to disease. 20 Forbush’s 1915 Child Study cautions that a child short on sleep “is rapidly spending his non-too-abundant life-surplus.” 21 L. Emmett Holt, an early and highly influential pediatrician, published an infant-care catechism for mothers in 1894, The Care and Feeding of Children. Its brief treatment of sleep insisted a child needed a darkened and quiet room and “under no circumstances” should the baby share a bed, even with mother. 22 Even older children should have separate beds lest they contract “contagious diseases and bad habits.” 23 If an infant and child needed quiet and solitude to promote good health, the private bedroom served that goal even better than the separate bed. 24 Contrary to Wright’s assertion that “separate rooms for each individual were not considered necessary,” it seems rather that Victorian homeowners were advised to seek as much room segregation as they could manage. 25
House designers were a step ahead of the pediatricians and health experts. Gervase Wheeler, designer of popular mid-nineteenth-century house plans, wrote in 1851 that a home needed enough bedrooms to accommodate each member. 26 His 1855 plan for a “cheap home” (not intended to be pejorative) displayed a model house with two sleeping chambers on the second floor and four more sleeping rooms in the attic. 27 Clark’s survey of the American home describes the middle-class ideal of a bedroom for each child as established by 1860; McMurry’s survey of nineteenth-century farmhouses indicates designers specified children’s rooms and nurseries. 28 These architectural aspirations suggest that even prior to the medical concerns about children’s health, some Americans considered a privacy within the home—in the form of an unshared bedroom—to be of value to householders.
When upper- and middle-class parents heard advice to put their children in separate rooms, they were fairly likely to live in houses where that was possible. In 1900, around 30 percent of United States households had six or more occupants (who may or may not have been related). Not every household comprised a nuclear family, but most did, and the smaller the household, the more likely it would be only parents and children. If a married couple shared a room, that left siblings and other residents (perhaps grandparents) vying for the other bedrooms; only five-bedroom houses might prohibit bedroom sharing for households of six or more. But in that same year, about 37 percent of households contained only three, four, or five people. 29 Again, if married couples shared a room, some, if not all, of the remaining occupants would have found themselves able to get a separate bedroom in a two-, three-, or four-bedroom house. Upper-class couples had fewer children than their working-class counterparts; possibly, Adams has suggested, room availability and configuration encouraged middle-class Victorians couples to limit their family size. 30 For at least some of the middle class, and much of the upper class, the private bedroom was an achievable aspiration.
Twentieth-century houses for middle-class Americans were smaller than their earlier counterparts. Rambling, three-story, many-roomed Victorian middle-class houses, with plenty of room for families and their live-in servants, lost their appeal when “girls” rejected service for industrial work. 31 Encouraging families to exchange monthly rent payments for monthly mortgage payments, designers and builders offered modest options that even lower middle-class and working-class families could afford. 32 A “small house” could be a positive designation: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1929 endorsed the Architects’ Small House Service Bureau, formed specifically to improve architecture of houses not more than six rooms: kitchen, dining room, living room, and three bedrooms. 33 House plan books and catalogues gave consumers the smaller options with the bungalow, a design which dominated twentieth-century house architecture. In contrast to the Victorian house, where many rooms required many walls, smaller houses conserved interior space by eliminating rooms and the walls that delineated them. The most economical house plan eliminated the wasteful space of a hallway, making each room connected through another. Figure 3 offers a house where bedroom and bathrooms are reachable only through other rooms.
The Santa Barbara Community Arts Association held a design competition in 1924 for modest houses costing under US$5,000. This two-bedroom house has no hallways at all; one bedroom is accessible only through the living room, the other only through the dining room, and the bathroom is accessible only through the bedrooms. The architectural adoption of the “bedroom hallway” would eventually standardize bedroom separation from communal rooms. Source: Community Arts Association, Small House Designs (1925), 122.
Bungalow front doors opened right into the main room, without a receiving hallway or foyer. Living rooms replaced formal parlors, and flowed into dining rooms, although some of the most modest bungalows eliminated the dining room altogether, substituting it with a “dining area.” While a larger bungalow might have a small den, sunroom, or sewing room placed beside a public room, those rooms would be separated by French doors or open archways rather than traditional-sized and opaque doors. What by the mid-twentieth-century Americans called the “open plan” reveals its roots in the bungalow’s wide doorways and archways between rooms, though kitchens remained walled off. 34
A smaller house might compromise the norm of separating parents from children and children from each other, but architects still found ways to accomplish bedroom privacy within the house. The tandem bedroom disappeared. Wilson’s 1910 Bungalow Book shows 112 houses, only 2 with tandem bedrooms. 35 Tandem rooms still appear: first-floor bedrooms are often accessible only through living or dining rooms rather than private corridors; many bedrooms are connected to a jack-and-jill bathroom (a bathroom connected to two, usually equally sized bedrooms); a couple of bedrooms connect to a sewing room. But tandem bedrooms waned, and access to bedrooms nearly exclusively came through a hallway. The Building Brick Association of America, seeing “[w]hat we most need in America is a better class of small domestic architecture,” held a competition for bungalow design (built with bricks, of course). 36 The 100 designs they published (out of 666 received) in 1912 contain mostly two- or three-bedroom houses. In two-story houses with first-floor bedrooms, often the largest bedroom (though not much larger and not always) is on the first floor; second-floor bedrooms often are of equal size. Again, we may infer that the marital couple shared the larger, first-floor bedroom with children consigned to the second floor. Alcoves, sewing rooms, and dressing rooms are entirely absent from the Brick Association designs nor is there a single tandem bedroom. Von Holst’s 1913 book on prairie style homes shows some sixty-odd floor plans, only seven with tandem bedrooms. 37
Gustav Stickley’s 1912 book on craftsman style houses contained expansive commentary adjacent to floor plans, suggesting different ways owners might use their rooms. The two bedrooms on the first floor of one bungalow might be converted into workroom or den since the three bedrooms on the second floor “would be enough to accommodate a small family” and another two-bedroom bungalow is large enough for a “small” family. 38 Describing a two-bedroom, “inexpensive cottage for a small family,” Stickley pointed out it is “entirely suitable for the first home of a newly married couple just starting in life, or for a man and wife whose children are all married and gone,” suggesting even a childless couple needs a spare bedroom. 39 A house suited to “an average-sized family” contained, on its second floor, four unconnected bedrooms plus a small, unconnected “sewing room,” indicating enough space for the marital couple plus three, possibly four, other single residents. 40 How many children might be in a “small”- or “average”-sized family remains unspecified, but three or four children comports with the fertility rates from the 1910 census, showing a birth rate then of about 3.5 children. Stickley did not routinely specify the marital chamber on floor plans but occasionally referenced it in copy. 41 The architect also highlighted, more than once, the desirability of keeping bedrooms accessible from a hallway rather than directly from public rooms, and while not all of the floor plans accommodated that preference, only the smallest and most modest ones omitted the buffering hallways he admired. 42 Only four houses had tandem bedrooms adjoining the largest, presumably master, bedroom. 43
By the end of the 1920s, two particular variations from earlier house design can be discerned that highlight bedroom privacy. First, access to first-floor bedrooms rarely came through a living room or dining room but instead could be reached only through a hallway. Saylor’s Distinctive Homes of Moderate Cost, published in 1921, contains no first-floor bedrooms accessible through anyplace but halls. 44 Smith’s 500 Small Houses of the Twenties, published in 1923, exhibited only eight houses with a bedroom exclusively accessible through a living or dining room, while twenty-four houses show first-floor bedrooms accessible through both the living room and a hallway, permitting access or privacy, as the inhabitants preferred. 45 Jones’s 1929 collection of 254 house plans included only two with a bedroom accessible only through the living room. Three others, reached through both living room and a hallway, allow private access. 46 Descriptive copy in Smith’s collection frequently lauds single-story house design in which the bedrooms occupy a different part of the house from the living and dining rooms, using words like “separated” and “isolated,” describing bedrooms in an “independent group.” 47 Jones specifically highlights the privacy of bedrooms even in the smallest houses, using the phrase “bedroom hall” and noting in some houses “sleeping quarters have the privacy of second floor bedrooms” due to that hall. 48
Second, the tandem bedroom for a child, adjacent to the largest bedroom, disappeared. Saylor’s Distinctive Homes from 1921 has a few. 49 Close’s collection of Country and Suburban Houses of the Twenties, published in 1922, includes only architect-designed dwellings for the wealthy. Since the plans are custom-made, room usage is described: for owners, child, daughter, boy, guest, and so on. They designate maid’s rooms and servants’ stairways, but show few tandems, most of them labeled “dressing” rooms. 50 Only one floor plan denotes a tandem room as a “child’s room.” 51 Smith’s 500 houses indicate only four floor plans with a tandem bedroom next to a main/principal bedroom. 52 Of Jones’s 254 houses, one includes “sewing room or nursery” tandem, another a “sewing or dressing room,” and third denotes a “study, sitting room, nursery or child’s room” but no obvious tandem for infant or child in the other 251 buildings. 53
The 124 floor plans in 1929 Home Builders Catalog further demonstrate the change. Only one house has a first-floor bedroom accessible through the living room. 54 Tandem rooms adjacent to living and dining rooms didn’t disappear; 40 of the 124 houses in the catalog have them. But instead of designated as chamber or bedroom, the rooms got different labels. Three tandems were libraries and four were dens; thirty-three of them were categorized as “sun parlor,” “sun room,” or “solarium.” 55 Second-floor tandems nearly disappeared, with those remaining smaller than the Victorian tandem bedrooms. Largest bedrooms in three houses had an alcove, two had a sewing room, and one each had a nursery, playroom, or study. 56 Ideal Homes: Two-story Houses, circa 1933, also confirms the repurposing of the first-floor tandem from bedroom to public space: of the sixty houses, there is a “den,” a “lounge,” five libraries, and nineteen sunrooms. 57 No bedrooms are accessible through public rooms.
Two Brown-Blodgett plan books, from 1938 and 1942, illustrate the continuing evolution of house architecture. In the 1938 edition, Selected Small Homes, houses ranged from 576 to 1,190 square feet, very small compared to the Queen Anne styles of forty to fifty years prior. 58 These houses continue the pattern of the teens and ‘20s: the number of bedrooms adjacent to living spaces decreases, with only two of the twenty-three houses in the 1938 edition having them and only five of the hundred in the 1942 book. In the 1942 publication, The Book of 100 Homes, separation of bedrooms from the rest of the rooms, is explicitly praised. 59 Many houses in both books touted expansion possibilities in unfinished attics, where one or two bedrooms and even a bathroom might be added; text accompanying the houses indicates the reason for additions will be growing families.
House designs for those of modest means emphasized flexibility of room usage and opportunity for expansion. In addition to unfinished, expandable attics, even first-floor rooms, could be repurposed. The Book of 100 Homes in 1942 specifically noted a first-floor bedroom not needed as such may be a study or additional living space; a nontandem room labeled a sun room “may be a library, a music room, a den or a bedroom, as best suits your needs”; and at least one breakfast room is suggested as a possible bedroom. 60 Another sunroom might be “an additional bedroom if you need it occasionally”; such a bedroom would do for a guest spending a few nights but not for a permanent resident of the household. 61 Flexibility, promoted as a positive attribute for house buyers, suggests that family size, particularly the number of children, mandated how many bedrooms householders need.
Publishers Brown & Blodgett explicitly comment on the desirability of separating generations. The 1938 book shows a 576-square-foot house with one bedroom adjacent to the living room, but the floor plan shows the potential for a second-floor expansion of two bedrooms and a half bath. Copy accompanying the house suggests the desirability of the house for a newly married couple who find it convenient to live on one floor. But the expansion could serve not merely that couple’s children; a “couple whose children are married can likewise live on one floor and let children and their guests do the stair climbing.” 62 This is a rare reference to adult children living at home, though during the Depression that could not have been uncommon. In the 1942 volume, a first-floor bedroom could be a place where “the elders may seek quiet there while giving over the living room for the entertainment of the young people’s guests, or it may be used as a study room for students.” 63 Home-buyers might like the Arlington, copy suggests, because the “bedrooms are well apart from the living room, where elders may retire without the disturbance of radio or the hilarity of the young members of the family and their guests.” 64 References to noisy “young people” and their “guests” suggests the presence of teenagers rather than children, alluding to new ideas of intergenerational privacy (historians have documented the twentieth century rise of spaces reserved for children and teenagers 65 ). If Victorian houses designated parlors, dining rooms, dens and studies where children were barred, twentieth-century houses, in contrast, began to carve out space expressly for children, a pattern amplified in the post baby-boom interest in finished basements, recreation rooms, play yards, and playrooms for children and adolescents. 66
An ideal American house in the first decades of the twentieth century both comported with and differed from a nineteenth century one. First, Americans wanted sleeping quarters separated from public and communal rooms. Roomy Victorians could do that, reserving the second and third floors exclusively for bedrooms. The introduction and then nearly universal use of the buffering hallway, however, preserved privacy even in a small, one-story house. House designers mentioned the “isolation” or “separation” of bedrooms as a plus; nobody promoted a bedroom adjacent to a living room as desirable house amenity. The bedroom hall, keeping visitors from the private zone, had become standard.
Second, in contrast to the Victorian practice of accessing rooms through other rooms, the bedrooms now separated from the rest of the house were themselves separated from each other. Not only did Americans seem want to sleep apart from rooms their guests would visit, they wanted to segregate the sleepers themselves. Houses where doors once enabled movement from bedroom to bedroom—where previously architects would have designed easy passage—no longer contained such access. Where this had the greatest impact would have been in physically separating parents and children. With the alcove gone, with the small tandem room next to the putative master bedroom having disappeared, hallways and walls divided the generations. This continued—and heightened—with the postwar housing boom, but this time with parenting and marital conceptions that explicitly affirmed and supported generational division within the household. Architecture separating adults from children, however, also separated the children from each other.
Generational and even intragenerational bedroom segregation had strong support among early twentieth-century child-rearing “experts,” who continued the earlier recommendations that children sleep apart from parents and, if possible, apart from each other. Despite the shift toward smaller homes, experts continued to promote placing the infant in a nursery and the child in a private bedroom. But the justifications for solo sleeping began to change. While previously it was the very mortality of a child at stake, as bed-sharing and room-sharing threatened the baby’s physical health, and poor sleep left a child susceptible to disease, twentieth-century children faced different dangers. Assured that their children could survive infancy, parents turned their attention to their emotional and psychological development, apparently just as fragile as their digestive systems had been a few decades earlier. Stearns et al. document the worry about sleep, to which can be added a particular consideration of room sharing. Twentieth-century child-rearing advisors fairly consistently hinted, assumed, or mandated private bedrooms for children to ensure sleep quality but eventually for other, not always consistent reasons: stimulation and respite from stimulation, quiet, and play. What a private bedroom especially provided was an independence within the family that built character and prepared a child for the adult world to come.
Recommendations for children’s bedrooms grew more explicit. A childcare booklet widely distributed by the federal government in 1922, Infant Care, advised parents to get a house, not a flat or apartment, so baby would have plenty of room. Not only should he sleep in his own bed, he should sleep “whenever possible in a room by himself,” as it is “very hard to give the baby the quiet and privacy he ought to have in a room that must be occupied also by other members of the family.”
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John Watson’s 1928 Psychological Care of Infant and Child took the solo bedroom idea to the furthest conclusion. Today we debate whether we can buy a motor car—whether the house or apartment is big enough to keep a dog—whether we can afford to belong to a club. But the young mother rarely questions whether her home can house a child or whether her husband’s salary or weekly wage will stretch far enough to feed another incessantly hungry body…the having of a child should be a carefully thought out operation. No mother has a right to have a child who cannot give it a room to itself for the first two years of infancy. I would make this a conditio sine qua non.
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Watson’s child-rearing advice was extreme even in its day: his “scientific” method of parenting included cautioning mothers against kissing their babies, as “coddling” ruined children. On the subject of where the baby and child ought to sleep, however, he was not at all an outlier. Parenting manuals, government pamphlets, and child development texts available in the 1920s and 1930s confirmed the desirability of private rooms. Blanton and Blanton in 1927 insisted on “one absolutely hard and fast rule. The child should never sleep in the room with his parents after he is a year or a year and a half old” (emphasis in original); they are less emphatic about sibling room sharing, only condemning bed sharing. 70 But D. A. Thom, in a 1928 government booklet, acknowledging “conditions often exist where it is necessary for two children to sleep together during preschool years,” warned this practice can only be “condoned” when children are of the same sex; this is obviously not a worry about sleep, per se, but about other, unnamed but clearly nefarious effects of room sharing. 71 That same year in another publication, he cautioned that children should separate from parents and worried about poor families who lack sufficient rent money for “privacy in sleeping quarters.” 72 Indeed, social reformers campaigning against tenement living cared not only about hygiene but the immodesty and immorality caused by overcrowding and sought to provide families—and the individual members of those families—more house privacy with tenement reform. 73
In a 1931 manual, Home Guidance for Young Children, Grace Langdon affirms the necessity of the infant and child learning to sleep alone, “without dependence upon help of any sort.” This means a separate room; Langdon indicates separate beds are crucial “where it is impossible to give children separate rooms.” A room of his own helps a child cultivate a “sense of privacy” which is as crucial as developing his sociability. 74 Langdon supplies detailed advice about cribs, bed springs, mattresses, bedding, rubber sheets, and how to make the bed but offers no suggestions about how to manage room sharing among children. Her advice remains unaltered in the second edition, published in 1946. 75
Arthur Gesell and Frances Ilg’s 1943 The Infant and Child in the Culture of Today recommended that mothers duplicate the experience of their two-week, postdelivery experience in the hospital. Baby should room with the mother during the day, so she may learn his rhythms and needs. “Naturally after the evening or night feeding the baby will be returned to his dormitory.” Despite their encouragement of breastfeeding, once home “the baby should sleep at night in a separate room, as he did in the hospital” if that is possible. 76 Their suggestion that this is a “natural” arrangement goes undefended and unjustified; if it is what is practiced in a modern, scientific hospital, then it must be good practice. Breckenridge and Vincent, also in 1943, affirm Gesell and Ilg’s views on sleep, concurring that an infant or child sleeps better, if possible, in “a room of his own.” 77
American families of lesser means, of course, did not have sufficient resources to provide children with solo bedrooms. Ladd-Taylor’s survey of mothers’ letter to the Children’s Bureau (publisher of the above mentioned Infant Care) show women’s concerns about many things but not their inability to give their children private bedrooms. Parents worried about illness, the absence of money for doctors, or food insecurity, or whether they had a home at all, certainly put children’s private bedrooms at the bottom of their wish lists. 78 But anyone exposed to the “experts,” and the advice of United States government through its publications, could not have missed the message: a child without a private bedroom would be at a developmental and psychological disadvantage.
Some of that disadvantage was the result of poor sleep; child-rearing experts worried quite a bit about the consequences of inadequate rest in terms of quality and quantity. When confronted with a disobedient or unhappy child, advised Forbash in 1915, “[f]atigue…should always be considered.” 79 Watson indicated a nap “relieves quarrelsomeness, temper tantrums and the like.” 80 Stearns et al. indicate the “most direct cause of the new concern about sleep…involved the spread and assimilation of a novel arrangement for children’s beds and bedding,” the “novel” arrangement being a new practice of providing individual bedrooms. 81 That is, the practice of putting children in rooms by themselves begat the worries about sleep. Yet solo sleeping was both cause and effect, as one justification for the private bedroom was to provide better quality sleep. Quiet bedtime routines, dark rooms (many advisors addressed children’s fear of the dark) maintained at the right temperature (not too cool and not too warm) with the right bedclothes and linens, and, above all, quiet without interruption supplied the best conditions for good sleep. 82 A younger or older sibling in the nearby bed only disrupted the precarious sleep environment.
Advisors also began to suggest that the experience of being alone had value. Infant Care in 1922 advised parents to live in houses rather than apartments, as while a baby might be able to thrive in such a space, a toddler needs more room. That pamphlet’s discussion of the baby’s room assures that it “is very hard to give the baby the quiet and privacy he ought to have in a room that must be occupied also by other members of the family.” 83 President Herbert Hoover’s White House Conference on Child Health and Protection issued a nineteen-point “Children’s Charter” in 1931; point seven sought to guarantee “[f]or every child a dwelling place safe, sanitary, and wholesome, with reasonable provisions for privacy; free from conditions which tend to thwart his development; and a home environment harmonious and enriching.” While conceding many Americans lived in older, substandard housing, the Conference promoted that “[i]deally the house should be so planned that each child may have a room of his own in which at times he can be by himself.” 84 The report continued: “Every child should have a place where he can be quiet and undisturbed and have an opportunity for uninterrupted study of home lessons or for reading or playing.” 85 Solitude itself, the Conference suggests, is essential for healthy development.
Depression-era families, of course, crowded into available housing, but Americans in that period also delayed marriage and child-bearing and had fewer children. Even in those tough economic times, many children occupied a private bedroom. 86 Some experts acknowledged the fit between house and family size. Glover and Dewey remarked in 1934 that American houses had shrunk to accommodate only a nuclear family, “reduced in size to three, four, five, at most six”; they declared the average nonrural family to be down to four. 87 A 1942 pamphlet from the American Public Health Association acknowledged families’ spatial challenges during “the emergency.” 88 Its authors, Ogg and Sandbank, shared helpful suggestions at managing cramped space, especially to provide as much nighttime privacy as possible by repurposing living and dining rooms as bedrooms. For those families fortunate enough to be able to select the best housing, accommodating children is paramount. “Of course, the ideal thing is for him to have a room of his own, or at least a room shared only with another child near his age.” The pamphlet suggested a backup plan in case no private bedroom can be secured: “Failing that [the private bedrooms]” give children secure corners for their possessions and playthings. Room-sharing, then, can be termed a “failure,” and so the home should be configured, as much as possible, to supply the benefit of a solo room, which extends to securing agency over a child’s personal possessions. 89
In the second half of the century, both house designers and child-rearing advisors promoted even more the idea that a private room helped aid child development and family life. Having been told for a few decades to constantly monitor their children, weighing every morsel of food and supervising every moment of play and adjusting nursery room temperature just so—after all, dangers lurked everywhere—parents now learned that children needed less attention. Watson’s advice, while at the extreme end, was to prevent parents from creating a dependent child, who would not come to adolescence and adulthood with appropriate confidence. Levy’s, published in 1943, Maternal Overprotection—whose title reveals all—warned of children, particular sons, who could not sleep without their mothers. Such parenting could only be viewed as pathological. 90 Kanner in 1941 took an easy, common sense approach to parenting but highlighted the difference between “mother love and smother love,” the latter fostering neediness and even crippling psychological disorder. 91 Mothering that acknowledges a child’s freedom, he says, is the right approach. Balancing watchfulness and supervision was on the way to becoming a significant parental challenge, and the structure of the house became a place for that balance to play out.
House building in the United States stalled during the fifteen years of the Depression and WWII, as did marriage and childbearing. Peacetime brought returning soldiers home and the economic confidence to marry and start families; they had mortgages and salaries to buy houses but demand well-outstripped supply. By the late 1940s demand for housing exploded. Whereas earlier house buyers leisurely chose lots and browsed through plan books, selecting a house suitable to particular needs of affordability, location, and family size, the new housing demand followed a different model: developers bought land and built on it, speculating (quite rightly) that families pressed for privacy and space would snap up housing as quickly as it could be built. Mass-produced housing, stripped of basements, second floors, attics, and architectural detail inside and out, was quickly and inexpensively built, affordable for more Americans than ever before. 92
Quickly built postwar houses had to be even tinier than small pre-Depression houses. 93 Benefits for returning WWII veterans included no-down-payment mortgage loans, but only for houses between 800 and 1,000 square feet and costing no more than US$8,000. 94 Small house architecture drew heavily from an already popular bungalow style, which eschewed foyer or reception hall and replaced dining rooms with dining alcoves or eating areas. Postwar housing design went further, however, sometimes eliminating the dining room and even opening up the kitchen area to create a feeling of greater spaciousness. Much of this openness was promoted as supportive of families with young children: busy mothers could keep eyes on their children, families sharing space could play games, watch television, and enjoy hobbies and games together. 95
Two- and three-bedroom house architecture coupled with a jump in fertility would suggest baby-boom kids with siblings would have to share a room. Certainly, many did, but the housing norm still suggested the desirability of individual bedrooms. One case study illustrates the pervasive solo bedroom ideal. Merely weeks after the close of WWII, the Chicago Tribune in September 1945 sponsored an architectural competition for single-family house design, asking for economical and efficient houses of good design. 96 The contest articulated three “problems”: a 1,100-square-foot home for “father, mother and a son aged six”; a 1,400-square-foot home for “father, mother, son aged twelve and daughter aged eight”; and a 1,700-square-foot home for “father, mother, two daughters aged sixteen and six, and a son aged twelve.” In 1948, ninety-two of the plans, including the twenty-four prizewinners, appeared in book form as Prize Homes, which included some photographs of designs which had been actually built. 97
The competition’s specific familial parameters provide unique insight how architects interpreted house norms. Some house designs—twenty-two of the ninety-two plans—lack any formal indication of which bedroom belongs to whom. 98 Those twenty-two, however, still give clues about intended occupancy: one bedroom is often bigger, may have two closets, and/or might show a larger bed or two twin beds, while another room shows only a single twin, distinguishing between a bedroom for two and a bedroom for one. Seventy house designs specifically indicate a parents’ bedroom. Either the floor plan directly labels a master, owners’, or parent’s room or the accompanying text refers to specific amenities of the owner’s room, cueing the reader as to which room that is.
Houses for the smallest families contain two bedrooms, occasionally with a smaller, third bedroom marked for study, guests, or sewing. Only one Prize Homes design shows the master bedroom with a partitionable alcove, “used for a baby’s bedroom and later converted into a study,” mimicking the Victorian tandem for children but affirming the idea that close proximity to parents should be only a temporary arrangement. 99 Another design for the family of three places the boy’s room at one end of a sprawling one story, far away from the parents’ room on the opposite end of the house. 100 All thirty-one houses for families of four, with opposite sex children, merited at least three bedrooms in the two-story houses all on the second floor. Clearly, a two-bedroom house would be insufficient for boy and girl children, affirming a discomfort with opposite-sex children sharing bedrooms rooted in the nineteenth century. 101
Families with three children—one boy and two girls—certainly could get by with only three bedrooms if the daughters shared. Seven of the twenty-nine houses in this group do contain only three bedrooms, indicating the shared room through labeling. But twenty-two of the twenty-nine houses in this category had four bedrooms, one for each child, and even one of those seven three-bedroom houses has an area marked “guest” which is not completely walled off but could be. And among the eight winners in that largest family category, only one of them, Winner #22, fails to give each child a separate bedroom. 102 (Winner #14, submitted for the category of family of four, has three bedrooms, “[t]hus the plan can easily accommodate a larger number than the family of four persons for which it is primarily designed.” 103 ) One plan colorfully names the children on the floor plan. “Mom and dad” share a bedroom at the back of the house’s bedroom wing; a jack-and-jill bathroom connects their room to that of “Little Janie.” “Billy” occupies the next room and furthest away is “Mary’s” bedroom, who as a sixteen-year-old might be, in just a few years, married and off in her own home. That by a better than two-to-one ratio architects—charged with designing modest, affordable housing—considered that a family of three children requires four bedrooms is a telling indicator of the solo bedroom ideal. All but seven of sixty-one houses for two or more children give each child a separate room.
Public areas of the house, however, supply plenty of opportunity for familial interaction as the architects universally rely on the open architecture of the bungalow reappears but pushing the style further. Copy occasionally promotes the openness, the lack of separation among living, dining, or, occasionally, kitchens; whether explicitly mentioned, the floor plans indicate the lack of walls. No Prize Homes houses have tandem rooms, however, and distinction between the open, flowing communal spaces and the walled, and closed bedroom spaces is strictly preserved. But the houses were explicitly designed for families with children, as the contest parameters indicated. In addition to denoting their bedrooms, other space for children is found in areas, inside and out, dedicated to “play,” “supervised play,” and “games and workshop.” Family togetherness might be achieved in a rumpus room, patio, and outdoor spaces or just within the open living space the houses consistently provided. The house designs of Prize Homes make space where children can be together with the family as well as apart from it.
Prize Homes uniquely conveys the pattern of unshared bedrooms, but the houses in that book were not unique. Harold Group’s 1946 plan book breaks down the house building and buying process for families of modest means. None of the forty-eight houses have tandem bedrooms, but copy refers sometimes to the needs of occupants. The Endicott “is a house for a family with children” so “there are three bedrooms upstairs.” 104 Rochelle, Inwood, and Kendall houses—each two-bedrooms—tout space for more bedrooms in second-floor expansions, as the family increases. 105 Two-thirds of architect Rudolph Mattern’s 50 House Plans for 1950 shows houses with expansion possibilities, always for when the family “grows.” One nonexpandable house with two bedrooms is ideal for “lucky newlyweds, retired couple or other small family.” 106 Mattern’s next volume, a year later, shows nineteen of fifty houses with expansion possibilities. 107 Another architect, Samuel Paul, designated three categories of houses based on household income in his 1952 plan book. The more modest the house, the more likely it would be an expandable one: twenty-five of the thirty houses for the lowest wage earners highlighted the possibility of finishing the attic in tandem with “additions to the family” and “as the family grows.” 108 But ten of the twenty-five houses for medium income families also had attics for expansion, as did even five of the twenty-five house for the most affluent households. Houses in Levittown, arguably the most well-known housing development of the era, offered small (under 1,000 square feet) houses with only two bedrooms. But all had unfinished attics, with the expectation that families would add bedrooms as their family size increased. 109 Figure 4 illustrates the unambiguous message: the number of bedrooms a family house “needs” depends on the number of children.
“Here’s a house that can grow with the family.” The Wayne, a two-bedroom (accompanying text applauds that “Sleeping quarters have great privacy in a wing all their own.”) one-bathroom house, could be expanded. The unfinished attic contains ample room for two sizable bedrooms, closets, and a full bathroom. Source: Harold Group, ed., House-of-the-month Book of Small Houses (Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1946), 69.
The First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Chicago published in 1951 Research Designed Homes, a booklet of very small houses, none over 1,250 square feet and most well under 1,000 square feet. The booklet’s copy relies on the language of privacy, using terms like “screened,” “secluded,” and “separate” to indicate that even in these small homes the residents can get away from each other, even while promoting the mother’s ability to observe her children at play. Some advantages include a hallway providing a “sound barrier,” a house where one “can enter the front door and go directly to the bedroom area without passing through any other room.” 110 Rooms for children may accommodate two, though the smaller bedrooms are specified as suitable for only one child. Many of the smallest houses promote expandability. A 1958 booklet of house plans showcases larger houses, all but one over 1,000 square feet and a few even greater than 2,000. In this volume, nearly every home has a dedicated family room in addition to the living room; more remarkably, many floor plans designate a room to be used as den or bedroom, the latter when there is a “larger family.” These houses are not expandable; the adaptability comes within the house itself, as room usage can be reconfigured, again, depending on the number of children. 111 Separation between sleeping and living areas, and privacy between parents and children, receive explicit attention. One design even secures sound privacy between children by the placement of closets and bathrooms so the bedrooms do not share a wall. 112
Thus, the solo bedroom continued to be an architectural ideal through the twentieth century. And just as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century child-rearing advisors recommended the private bedroom, so did post–WWII guidance on child-rearing confirm the practice as best. Reid tracks the rise of the private teen bedroom in postwar America as a normative space, but we can see families were counseled that children and young infants as well as adolescents should have separate rooms. 113 Sleep is still essential: Home Guidance for Young Children in 1946 justified the separate bedroom for good sleep. 114 But extending the advice from the first half of the century, child-rearing experts also promoted solitude as essential to development. Breckenridge and Vincent’s 1943 college textbook on child development notes the “physical space in the child’s home…will determine whether he has rest and quiet, play and exercise, or nagging and overcrowding, tension and unrest.” This is especially important when the child enters school, as home will need to be a haven from a busy day. 115 Their insistence on solitude leads them to conclude that the ideal home provides each child with a bedroom of his own. 116
Dr. Benjamin Spock's 1946 Baby and Child Care, arguably the most influential and certainly the most widely distributed child-rearing manual of its time, devoted a section to sleep, its bolded title giving away its essential message: “Out of the parents’ room by 6 months if possible.” Famously more flexible than his pediatric predecessors, Spock counseled parents to “Trust yourself: you know more than you think you do.” 117 His message on baby’s independence, however, was firm: though certainly babies could be sleeping in rooms by themselves much earlier than six months, the six-month marker is an absolute deadline by which to eliminate room sharing. He shared the same fear as some of his forebears: children, even the youngest ones, may be upset by conjugal relations. 118 He warned “psychiatrists have found cases in which the child awakened and was much disturbed.” Even a frightened child shouldn’t be permitted to come in to the parental bed “for any reason” lest “he is apt to cling.” Spock did support the child joining parents in bed for a morning cuddle, “so long as it doesn’t make either parent uneasy, by stirring up sexual feelings” and as long as the parent deflects “persistent sexual advances” from the child. 119 But he articulated another reason to segregate babies: so they won’t have an opportunity to “become dependent on this arrangement and be afraid and unwilling to sleep anywhere else.”
Just because infants and children should be separated from parents, however, does not necessarily mean they should be separated from siblings. On this issue, Spock is less emphatic. “Whether children should sleep in a room by themselves or with another youngster is largely a practical matter. If it’s possible, it’s fine for children to have a room of their own, especially as they grow older, where they can keep their own possessions under control and have privacy when they want it. The main disadvantage of two young children in the same room is that they are apt to wake each other up at the wrong times,” indicating in this paragraph that sleep is the biggest obstacle to sharing. Pragmatic Spock reassures parents that their children will not be damaged by room sharing if they cannot afford to provide separate rooms, but his reassurance still suggests the desirability of single occupancy that room sharing is an unavoidable deviation from what is best. Young children get better sleep, and older children get a psychological benefit. Keeping their “own possessions under control” and “privacy when they want it,” he suggests, is good for children and should be acquired when possible, advantages which go well beyond slumber. 120 Room sharing may occur when it is impossible to do otherwise.
Despite reassurance of the acceptability of room sharing, other sections of Baby and Child Care assume the child occupies a private room. Putting toddlers to bed might be challenging since the child might “feel a little lonesome going to sleep in a room by himself”; humans “are born sociable” so the stuffed toy can provide comfort and companionship when the child is alone. As the loneliness will be outgrown, so will the objects. 121 Don’t punish a child by sending him to his room, as parents “want him to love his room for play or sleeping.” 122 Moving a child to his new room before the birth of the new baby helps him feel less displaced; 123 if a solo room is “out of the question,” then outfit the shared room with a locked cupboard for his playthings. 124 A toddler afraid of going to sleep might be helped by having an older brother or sister sleep in “his room,” presumably until the fear subsides. 125 Spock fails to address the psychological impact on the child suddenly asked to bunk with a younger sibling. Baby and Child Care never advises parents on how to help siblings negotiate occupying a shared room, though surely that might be a natural source of conflict.
Spock’s cohort concurred. In 1948, The Happy Home explicitly promoted the physical need for a home to provide spatial privacy, for there “must be in every home some spot, however small, which is the outward symbol of each individual’s inner, developing self…. Each member of the family needs some chance for privacy. He needs some place to go to when his nerves are on edge, when he is overwhelmed and confused, a place where he can wait alone in silence until he has gathered himself together again.” An unshared bedroom provides such a space, where a child can develop “a sense of possession and freedom,” and when children must share, parents should divide the room so each child has a private space within it. 126 The Happy Home suggests the unshared bedroom soothes. As the “outward symbol” of the self, the retreat to the room creates opportunity for reflection and repair against the world of conflict, even and perhaps especially within the family. Faegre and Anderson’s Child Care and Training, though acknowledging perhaps it would not be not possible for “average households,” wanted each child to have his own room. Their advice stayed consistent through the eight editions of the manual, published between 1928 and 1958. 127
Late 1940s and 1950s and even 1960s’ parents put Spock’s best seller on their bookshelves and consulted it; at the same time, they were starting their families they were also buying their first houses. They and their offspring—the baby boom—moved into the first postwar subdivisions that dominated midcentury housing standards. Child-rearing advice merely affirmed for psychological and developmental reasons what household designers and architects had been adhering to for decades: the best house is one which provides a private bedroom for each child. When adult baby boomers began to have their children, in the 1970s and 1980s, they could rely on many authoritative voices—in addition to Spock—for child-rearing advice; today, public libraries, bookstores, and Internet sellers have dozens and dozens of books on child-rearing. At least as late as 1972, the United States government suggested a growing child “normally will want a room of his own” and recommended strategies for parents who “can’t arrange this.” 128 Best-selling author Penelope Leach in the 1970s and 1980s did not specifically recommend that a child have a separate room but merely seems to assumed that will be the case, helping parents with children who will be “sleeping alone.” 129 Dreikurs addresses the child afraid to go to bed, where he faces “darkness and solitude.” 130 The American Academy of Pediatrics neglected to mention room sharing in their 1995 edition, only recommending that to alleviate sibling rivalry, have your child “get the house ready…fixing up the baby’s bedroom.” 131 Spock’s 2004 edition eliminated his earlier, locked cupboard strategy for room-sharing children, suggesting only that when a new baby is expected, a child whose “room is to be given over to the baby moves…to her new room several months before.” 132 Contemporary child-rearing manuals omit the topic of private bedrooms; why should books targeted to middle-class parents address a challenge they don’t have? Even the subgenre of children’s sleep advice does not acknowledge any siblings sharing rooms. 133
Sidonie Gruenberg’s The Parents’ Guide to Everyday Problems of Boys and Girls, published in 1958, merits discussion precisely because it uniquely addresses room sharing in the section on sleep. “It would be nice if each child could have a room to himself or herself, but that is not always possible to arrange”. Small houses (she elsewhere laments that loss of a stairway, at the top of which children might perch to observe adult social life downstairs 134 ) prevent that, so she provides tips on how to divide rooms for different age children, and negotiate the bedroom for different uses like homework and storage. Not only does she acknowledge the reality of American house architecture, she even notes disadvantages and advantages to room sharing, the only child-rearing expert to do so. The considerable cons—mother and father will need to arbitrate more conflicts, privacy is harder to secure, younger siblings struggle to find their independence, different bedtimes need managing, and quarrels will ensue—outweigh the pros, but there is one: “it makes for a closer relationship between the two children who share a room”. 135 Gruenberg is virtually the only advisor to see room sharing as anything but a complete deprivation. 136 She is also a rare voice in suggesting that one advantage of private rooms is that room sharing is a headache for parents called upon to adjudicate disputes between children, disputes surely mitigated with bedroom segregation. Children occupying separate bedrooms makes parenting easier.
Parenting manuals and booklets usually devote only a sentence or two to any aspect of children’s bedrooms, but they still articulate the desirability of a private room. Experts emphasis three benefits: independence, privacy, and child possessions. Independence is mostly connected to sleep, as advisors seek to create conditions under which a child will sleep on his own. Infants and children who require conditions other than regular quiet and dark will always be dependent on those conditions. This applies to pacifiers and stuffed animals and nightlights, but it also extends to the presence of other people. Independence in sleep is the most frequent justification for a separate bedroom. Stearns et al. treat this issue extensively.
Sleep aside, however, a child benefits from having a private room, even in the daylight hours. Experts frequently cite privacy, and what they mean by this is solitude. Langdon wants a child to learn to be alone as well as social.
136
The White House Conference on Child Health and Protection articulated a housing ideal in 1931: where a child has a room of his own “in which at times he can be by himself,” not merely for sleep but for “uninterrupted study…reading or playing.” Spock, as well, advocates a physical separation—even for the infant—as a condition of health development. It’s good for a baby during his play periods to be somewhere near his parents (and brothers and sisters, if any) so that he can see them, make noises at them, hear them speak to him, have them show him a way to play with something occasionally. But it isn’t necessary or sensible for him to be in a parent’s lap or arms or to have his mother or father amusing him much of the time. He can be enjoying their company, profiting from it, and still be learning how to occupy himself. When new parents are so delighted with their baby that they are holding him or making games for him most of his waking hours, he become quite dependent on these attentions and demand more and more of them.
137
In addition to independence and privacy, twentieth-century child-rearing experts list another benefit to a child’s separate bedroom: a need to secure his private possessions, those books, and playthings which should be under his control. Having learned that play is not merely youthful diversion but a crucial piece of necessary child development, advisors promoted play and finding place within the house for it. 139 That extends to the playthings themselves; advisors assume that children will possess objects exclusive to them. This sense of exclusivity is remarkable, suggesting that there are objects that cannot or should not be shared with siblings. Victorian era houses contained many delicate and fragile decorative objects, which may or may not have been behind glass or up high, but they were also likely to be in rooms forbidden or at least restricted to children. A private bedroom suggests the inversion: a room of objects also off-limits, but this time in control of the child. Even when advisors acknowledge the unfortunate setting of a shared bedroom, they suggest that within the shared room or somewhere in the house, there be a spot where children have, according to the American Public Health Association pamphlet of 1942, a private space for storage. 140 Spock thought a separate bedroom helps children keep “their own possessions under control.” 141 Langdon’s 1931 parenting manual advocates separate bedrooms for sleep, but her 1946 edition adds a new justification. “[E]ven a child of two or three gets a great satisfaction from having a place that his own, where he can have his own things, and which he feels belongs peculiarly to him” (original emphasis). If children must share, “each should have some space alotted [sic] to him so that he still has a place he can call his own.” 142 Ogata’s excellent treatment of play space within the midcentury American home shows children’s bedrooms satisfy a need for imagination and creativity, to which can be added that house designers, experts, and thus families wanted those bedrooms to be private ones. One “modest” house design she discusses would have children in a shared bedroom with adjacent playroom. But that would have been an outlier; based on a review of house catalogs and considering the voices of child raising experts, two rooms devoted to children would have been separate bedrooms for each child, rather than one common bedroom and one common playroom. 143
Hulbert reads an “all-American insistence on solitary slumber as the bedrock, so to speak, of personal autonomy”; American architecture and child expertise bear this out. 144 To this, we may add: not merely solitary slumber, but the solitary room bears the hallmark of autonomy. Sociologists, psychologists, and historians of American culture have noted the rise of the child and teen bedroom as a significant space. 145 The “gendered” bedroom, ascendant in the early part of the twentieth century and continuing to this day, clearly makes room sharing between brothers and sisters difficult. 146 The personalized, individual decor that begins in the second half of the century makes room sharing nearly impossible: if the notice on the door proclaims, it to be “Jessica’s Room” and the room itself displays Jessica’s personal style and interests, it cannot also be Jennifer’s room, let alone Josh’s.
Family size and household size in the United States have steadily decreased over the last 200 years. Room sharing would have had to increase, at least slightly, at the onset of the anomalous baby boom; the majority of houses built in 1950, for example, had only two bedrooms. Households with two or three children did have to room share in a two- or three-bedroom house, but the housing supply adapted. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, architects and mail-order housing providers promoted expandability as a way of making a single-family home affordable for younger home-buyers. Turning a small house into a larger one continued to be touted by postwar housing developers; Levittown houses, for example, had unfinished attics where one or two more bedrooms could be added to the existing two bedrooms when a family’s needs changed and resources allowed. 147 By the 1960s and 1970s, however, Americans had little interest in renovation. By the early 1960s, Clark notes, the less than 1,000-square-foot two-bedroom home had already expanded: the typical house had become 1,200 square feet with three bedrooms. 148 Baby boomers living in two-bedroom dwellings just relocated to three-bedroom houses to accommodate their second child; those with three children might buy a four-bedroom house, as like the one in Figure 5. 149 By the late twentieth century, new family patterns emerged: children raised by single adults who had divorced or were never married, adults explicitly choosing to raise children without a partner, the rise of same-sex couples with children, and even a jump in grandparents raising their grandchildren. Regardless of the particular makeup of families with adults and children, however, the housing pattern requires no adaptation if American culture assumes adults, whatever their demographic profile, have rooms of their own, and that children, no matter their age, sex, or gender, should also have their own rooms.
Bernard Slater and Patrick Gallaugher submitted this design to the Chicago Tribune Prize Homes competition; it is promoted as “plan for a limited budget.” Designed specifically for a family of parents plus three children the house supplies, despite its attention to cost, each child with a separate bedroom. Locating the parents’ bedroom on the first floor and all the children’s bedrooms on the second floor anticipates later practices of generational segregation within the house. Source: Tribune Company, Prize Homes (Chicago, IL: Wilcox and Follett, 1948), 86. (Image rearranged from original placement).
Need to room share is significantly lessened when the decline in fertility coincides with an increase in house size. In 2014, 12 percent of women aged forty to forty-four had borne four or more children, with 53 percent of them having had only one or two children (15 percent having none). 150 By 1990, 53 percent of American housing had three or more bedrooms, 151 a trend that has grown. 152 The supply of many-bedroomed houses is greater than ever, and the number of children to put in those bedrooms is decreasing. Middle-class Americans with only two children but living in high-priced urban areas may find room sharing unavoidable, 153 and some parents might find it more convenient for young children to room share, though less so for older children. 154 But by the end of the twentieth century, families chose their houses and family sizes in tandem, each influencing the other: an anticipation of a new child often means a move to larger accommodations, and insufficient housing can be an impediment to increasing the size of one’s family. 155 Most American children live in houses which enable them to have their own rooms, continuing a normative practice supported by a century of housing design along with a nearly universal agreement among child-rearing experts that children, in the name of independence, privacy, and control over personal possessions, ought to have their own bedrooms.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Lake Forest College student researchers Tia Thaning, Asimwe Oben-Nyarko, Zach Hines, Leslie Tenorio, and Krista Grund-Wickramaseker contributed to several aspects of this project. Their help was incalculable.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.