Make Your Child’s World Complete with Real Beds for Children
Let’s take a moment here to think about kids. Remember being one? The world used to be absolutely fascinating: full of colours and shapes, sounds and textures. Everything, including going to bed, was an adventure. Only going to bed wasn’t, because beds were boring structures – no shape, no colour, just somewhere you got told you had to go when it got dark. Not even the distraction of a mobile left, once you got out of your cot. Childrens beds are the only things in a child’s world that are not designed to stimulate, to get some kind of interest or emotional reaction. Is it any wonder, then, that kids hate them?
Real beds for children – that is, beds actually designed with the little ones firmly in mind – are pretty hard to come by. They do exist, though (there’s actually a very decent site selling them in the UK, under the banner Sandman Beds, which even consults kids on its bed designs) – and if you can find them, you’ll be able to change your own world as you attend to your child’s.
Here’s the thing: proper childrens beds don’t have to stimulate in the wrong (i.e. getting little Johnny or little Jane hyper excited) way. Stimulation simply means “engaging with mentally”. You can, believe it or not, be stimulated into restfulness – and that’s what these new beds for children manage to do.
How can a bed make a child want to get into it – or want to sleep? Easy. Calm colours, nice shapes, and interesting patterns. It’s the real world equivalent of counting sheep – or of making a whole bed out of the mobiles that get banished once cot-hood is over and done with. There’s nothing more soporific to an already tired child than staring at a fascinating combination of shapes, colours and textures. Childrens beds, far from being places the child feels “banished” to at the end of an exciting day, should be places where that child can make a safe and happy transition between sleeping and waking. What’s the point of throwing him or her into a completely un-stimulating environment directly after he or she has been stimulated all day long? One suspect, if we could really remember what bedtime was like as a child, that we have all been hugely confused by this apparent transition. When you think about it, it probably feels a bit like a punishment.
Beds for children, of course, aren’t designed to feel punishing: they just – unless they are built to be colourful and stimulating – do. Anyone wondering why his or her child finds it so hard to settle at night would do well to consider the surroundings. From all that fuss, all those toys and shapes and books, to a blank white oblong? Bespoke childrens beds, with their fairytale shapes, their soothing colours and lovely textures, are probably a wise investment.
A decent bed can be made for a very reasonable price – and of course one has the added satisfaction of knowing that, handmade, it will take a lot more daytime punishment than a shop bought item. Why not think about adding one to your child’s world?
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