How To NOT Design Your Kid’s Room – A Cautionary Tale

I love a good cautionary tale, where you get to hear how someone else messed up their life in the name of you avoiding repeating their mistake. I hesitate to write this like I do all things where I have to go back on a design decision, but it has come up a lot with my friends recently, and a warning to you all felt necessary. So here is your dose of “blogger Schadenfreude” for the month – If my failures make you happy then today is your day. I feel pretty dumb, but all design failures are great lessons to learn, risks are taken, and therefore pitfalls are constant. You see my wonderful daughter who I honestly can’t say enough good things about now “strongly dislikes” her wallpaper (she knows not to say hate, but that’s the sentiment). Her room is so freaking cute and she will absolutely admit it, but to her, it feels like a little girl’s room. And she is 9 1/2 – NOT a little girl anymore. So let’s back up and go step by step on how we got here:

2020 – We finally got into escrow on our home and we were so excited. We lived in lockdown at the mountain house which is famously neutral. “why doesn’t our house have any color” was the consistently taunting question.

2021 – We moved up to Portland and while renting a house nearby I started designing their rooms – desperate to start doing the fun stuff (and to avoid thinking about the daunting renovation that felt neverending at the time). Elliot LOVES design, color, and pattern – she wanted to be very involved and boy was it fun to do it with her. I know we shouldn’t label our children but this girl is extremely enthusiastic and easily excited about all the things (likely a 7 enneagram like her mother, although she has STRONG 3 tendencies – also like her mother). She wanted to be a huge part of the process and honestly, it was just so fun for me – zero regrets on how I went about it, by the way. She is so hard to say no to. We went on Pinterest together and most of what she loved was a hard no for me (unicorns, fairies, etc – both of which I like but I knew she would regret those as wallpaper) but what I gleaned from her is that she wanted color and pattern – AND SO DID I!!! But as she aptly puts it now, “I was six, Mom. Who lets a 6-year-old make a long-term decision?”. LOL (She’s 9 1/2 now).

We decided on this awesome butterfly wallpaper by Schumacher which I honestly thought had more negative space, but regardless it is indeed fun as heck. While it was busier than I could handle in my own bedroom she loved it and we designed the room around it. We didn’t use temporary wallpaper or pre-pasted and I’m not even sure if the wallpaper installer primed it beforehand (which would make it easier to remove). That’s all to say this paper isn’t permanent, but it’s not easy to take down either.

2022-2024 – She loved her room – I mean, it’s incredibly cute. I won’t claim that she knew how lucky she was to have her mom be a designer who creates this as her job (she’s a kid, it’s not her job to instinctively know how the world is run and how privileged she is). But I do know that she loved it… for a while and felt really thankful. She showed it off to her friends proudly and we gushed together about how fun it was and how it represented so perfectly her personality.

2024 – Now. Well, she grew up. Starting about a year ago (so like a year after it was done) she got it in her head that the wallpaper is for little girls and no one wants to be older, bigger, or more teenager-y than an 8-year-old girl. It started small and not bratty at all, just comments like “When will I be able to redo my room?” and I didn’t shame her for those comments, I want her to express what she wants, but I also didn’t comply. While I was of course annoyed with an internal “WTF??”, I realized quickly that the annoyance was with my past naive self, not her.

It’s My Fault…I Know!!

So let me be very clear, the culprit here is ME, not her. She is a sweet pre-tween who wants her room to have the flexibility to grow with her changing styles. I was the mom that wanted to put hot pink butterflies on my 6-year-old’s walls without playing out the long game. It’s totally normal to reject the “little girl” style as you are trying to find your own voice and independence into the tween years. DOH.

What Does She Want To Change It To?

Purple. Chartreuse. Lavender. It changes daily and with passion. She currently HATES hot pink, but I think that’s because her cousin currently hates it. She also is “over” Taylor Swift in favor of Olivia Rodrigo, which she will likely be over soon. Now you might have a kid that doesn’t care about design/style in which case you might be able to take a big design swing and they won’t want to change it ever. But I think because of my job, my kids actually want their rooms to look like them, they care about style. Their brains are rapidly growing, therefore their personalities are developing daily, which means their personal style is shifting at warp speed. These tween years are wild (I love them so much) because they still sleep with stuffies and yet fight me about not letting them be YouTube Stars (nope). She’s begging for crop tops and to wear heels and makeup, claiming she’s “almost a grownup” and I have to actively shut my mouth to not blurt out “Girl, you don’t like vegetables yet”. She’s just being exactly the age that she should be, stretching and pushing and doing it totally respectfully by the way. I LOVE watching them right now become their whole own person. (If you don’t follow Lisa Damour you HAVE TO – she is the best teen psychologist on the internet and loves celebrating all things teen and is FULL of incredible mantras and advice).

Kids are meant to grow, change, push back, seek their own identity away from their parents…Which is why I feel badly about my mistake – I should have never made a big semi-permanent style decision in her room when she was 7, even if she did want it. I locked her in to hot pink butterflies and cute or not, they don’t feel like her anymore.

What Should I Have Done Instead?

Just painted it a relatively neutral color or white and let her decorate it however she wanted it. It’s what I did for her cousins’ bedroom (seen here) which I think is the right move. furniture that can grow with them, but enough negative space for them to show off their personality – nothing stylistically permanent. The rooms that they love on TV are full of posters, polaroids, and SO MUCH CLUTTER – these little relics they collect that provoke emotion and start to build their identity. So by putting a busy pattern on her wall, with butterflies, and in bright colors she feels locked in and she’s not wrong. She still puts posters all over it and rearranges everything all the time to look a bit “cooler”. I love that she cares and that she feels empowered to have a personal style and to voice it. I just wish I hadn’t locked her in so much.

So What Are We Going To Do? Change it?

Nothing for now. I mostly deflect (it comes up a lot) but when pushed I say that when she is 13 we can revisit the conversation (which will be 6 years from install – she does NOT like this answer as it feels like 50 years away). When REALLY pushed I’ve told her she can save her money to take it down and paint, but we both know that’s dumb and unfair. This was my fault, not hers and I am the one that needed to be taught a lesson that she gets to witness. Now don’t hold me to the 13-year-old thing, who knows, but as of now, it’s not changing anytime soon. She also recently mentioned wanting to move into the guest room when she’s a teen so she can have her own bathroom because “Mama, a boy and a girl teenager can NOT share a bathroom” which is 100% not true (but with two bathrooms up there she’s also not wrong to conclude they might each have their own space at some point). If she moves into the guest bedroom then we could keep this one as a really whimsical guest room or maybe by then I’ll let myself off the hook and peel it off. But for now, we aren’t doing anything about it. It feels far too wasteful to only have it for soon to be 3 years especially when I should be a far better example on the internet. I have to live with my mistake (it’s also so cute still so it’s not as painful for me:))

Lesson Learned…

But what I won’t do again and what I urge you not to do is lock your kid into a very specific style especially when they are entering their tween years. I actually think her first or second nursery (both light tree murals hilariously) had more longevity than this one, so I really did make an egregious choice. I love the energy of this wallpaper but it’s a lot, it’s everywhere and it does skew younger (especially if you do NOT want to be little anymore). I think some patterns and colors have more age/style flexibility so if you are inclined you could probably still go for it. And I think changing a room is not abnormal, especially for those of us who really enjoy doing it with our kids. But giving them room, space, and time to find and change their style in their one and only personal space is really important to them and I kinda blew that one.

With Charlie (my 11-year-old boy), he LOVES his room as-is (neon lights, skateboard lamp, posters, a big round chair) so until he wants to shift or asks for my help I won’t be investing time/energy/money into it (I think he’s afraid I’m going to make it too girly which I get, LOL). Every now and again he says “I want a hammock in my room” where I say “Ooh that would be cool” but I’m making no such moves for a while.

Had I not wallpapered her room, Elliot, my bright, happy, extremely fun to be around 9-year-old would have decorated the hell out of those walls, peppering joy everywhere in there with or without me. It wouldn’t look as well designed, balanced, etc, but it would have allowed her to experiment and have more fun in the only space she owned. I got caught up in our collective enthusiasm for color/pattern which is dangerous when I’m the one that is supposed to be the reasonable adult with a fully formed brain. So when she says with a smile “Mama, did you really let a 6-year-old make such a big decision…aren’t you the grownup?” I can’t help but laugh. She’s totally right.

The Moral Of The Story

While most of you probably wouldn’t do this in the first place, but just paint the room a simple color. Make some style choices with lighting, rugs, curtains and bedding – all things that are easier to move to another room or store should they tire of it. But don’t lock them in while their personalities are changing so rapidly.

Also…stencils and wall stickers FTW. Paint a stripe or a scallop – there are so many either really temporary or more timeless choices out there:)

Opening Image Credits: Design by Emily and Elliot Henderson (and ARCIFORM) | Photo by Kaitlin Green | From: Birdie’s Bedroom Reveal!! Designing WITH (Not For) Your Kids, And How We Exploded This Room With Color

The post How To NOT Design Your Kid’s Room – A Cautionary Tale appeared first on Emily Henderson.