Kidspace : Creating Places for Children Gives Them Room to Grow

When 7-year-old Jed D’Abravanel comes home from school, the two-bedroom home he shares with his mother, Kore, teaches him further powerful lessons about himself and his life.

For instance, Jed learns about his own importance by having his own living room, next to the regular living room. There--in a space complete with a small table and chairs, an easel, shelves for his toys and a library section for his books--Jed can be near his mother and her guests and still read, paint and play with his toys. A folding screen partially separates the two areas, creating a psychological line that both mother and son agree the toys must not cross.

According to D’Abravanel, this arrangement also teaches her son about respecting other people’s spaces.

“When he knows what’s his, what’s mine and what’s ours, he can relate better to the world,” she said. “And we have less conflict.”

Hundreds of years ago, the special needs of children in the home were not so clearly recognized. According to Karin Calvert, author of “Children in the Home: The Material Culture of Early Childhood 1600-1900,” childhood in the 17th Century “simply had no positive attributes of its own considered worthy of expression.” Then, for example, crawling was frowned on as a bestial activity and was prevented as much as possible, Calvert said.

But today, child psychologists believe that homes like Jed’s, which are set up to nurture a child, while still respecting adult needs, can help a child develop into an adult with strong feelings of self-esteem, inner security and peace.

Outside Jed’s home, there are more lessons for him about life. He learns about his connection with the earth in his yard, which has been transformed from an English garden to what he calls “a clearing in the woods.”

“It’s very natural without killing anything,” D’Abravanel said.

This connection with nature is “grounding” for her son, explained D’Abravanel, a Santa Barbara-based architectural designer. “In the suburbs and in the city, children are being removed from what’s really natural. When that happens, they lose touch with reality.” She said Jed’s closeness to nature helps him be calmer and “more at peace with the world.”

At night, Jed gets a feeling of security when he climbs up into his special cubbyhole bed, his mother said. The cozy space was fashioned from the top half of D’Abravanel’s closet, which is on an adjacent wall. She doesn’t begrudge him the extra consideration. To her, the physical environment of a home should be based on a simple premise: “I think it’s very important that the house reflect the people.”

According to child psychologists, architects and interior designers, there is much that parents can do in the home environment to increase their children’s well-being.

For example, they can help foster the child’s self-esteem by placing his or her name and image around the house. Adding a lower rod in the family coat closet to give young children access to their own garments can give them feelings of autonomy. And some of the stress children have from living in a world designed by and for adults can be lessened by placing some of the home’s artwork at child’s-eye level.

“The house should be comfortable for whoever lives there,” said Jill Waterman, a clinical child psychologist, adjunct professor of psychology at UCLA and the mother of 8-year-old twins.

“And if that means changing the house a little, I think that should be done,” she said.

To give children a feeling of security, she suggests offering children pint-sized beanbag or rocking chairs in the living room.

Further, she said, “Kids need to have some space to call their own.” This doesn’t necessarily mean a room of one’s own. Even a desk will do. “Kids need stuff that’s their own,” she said. “It allows the child to develop a separate sense of self. This is me. This is myself.

“A child should have an appropriate space that’s just theirs for eating,” Waterman said. “On a very basic level, it makes them feel secure. ‘When I’m here, I get taken care of.’ ”

Another way to help children develop a sense of self is to ask them how they want their rooms decorated.

“You may think they would like baseball paper, but what they really want is butcher paper to draw on,” Waterman said. “The way they want it may not be high fashion, but it’s the way they want it.”

Psychotherapist Lillian Carson put that same idea to the test decades ago, when her three children were small and she allowed them to decorate their own rooms.

“They each had very definite ideas, very different from my ideas,” Carson recalled. “This delighted me. And it horrified me that I was going to impose my ideas on them.”

During the decorating process, it was a struggle for Carson to support her 10-year-old daughter’s choice of multicolored carpeting and her 5-year-old daughter’s choice of wallpaper. But the end results were profound.

“The upshot is they loved their rooms,” Carson said. “They loved cleaning up and taking care of their rooms. It was a real statement of themselves.”

As well as building self-esteem, Carson said, the home environment can be soothing for children in an increasingly stimulating and violent world.

“People need to feel safe, and they don’t feel safe these days. It’s more tense,” said Carson, who lived in Los Angeles for many years and now lives in Montecito with her husband, architect Sam Hurst.

“A home needs to be a haven for a child,” Carson said, suggesting that parents create a “non-perishable home where a child can relax.”

“I know a child who lived in an all-white house and she had ulcers by the time she was 6,” Carson said. “So many houses are beautiful, but they’re museum pieces. It makes you nervous. The house should be livable.”

At the Stuart House, a Santa Monica facility for evaluating and treating sexually abused children, the designers created a calming environment by using soft textures, patterns with no jagged edges and soft pastel colors.

“We designed it to be very soothing,” said Mary Beth Rodin, assistant director of the hospital’s Rape Treatment Center and project manager for Stuart House. “Children are subjected to a lot of stress, even kids who don’t have to deal with a trauma.” She believes that soft colors and calming interior would be good ideas for home use.

Attention to color in children’s spaces was also important to the late Antonio Torrice, who was San Francisco-based designer of children’s spaces and who was a consultant on Stuart House.

“Hyperactive, nervous children reach out for calming colors like blues and greens,” Torrice wrote in his book, “In My Room: Designing For and With Children.” “Passive children are more likely to gravitate toward reds and oranges for a tonic effect.”

This tendency of children to gravitate toward specific colors and surroundings that nurture them is only one reason that Torrice advocated letting children take a dominant role in decorating their own rooms.

“By letting children control the environment where they spend the most time, you establish their self-confidence and security,” Torrice wrote. “Only when young ones see that they can have an effect on their surroundings will they cultivate the positive feelings essential to mastering the world around them.”

Another way that parents can help create positive experiences for children is by making it easy for them to succeed, especially in taking care of their rooms, Torrice said. Tactics include providing plenty of open baskets for storage of toys and a child-height clothes tree for hanging up coats or pajamas.

Easy-to-open drawers are very important, Torrice wrote, because it is hard for small children to grasp small knobs and they will vent their frustration by leaving their belongings in disarray. And a messy room creates unneeded tension for children who, Torrice said, need order in their lives to feel comfortable.

Given today’s increasingly complex world, the growing need of children (and adults) for a comfortable, cozy feeling at home is changing the face of architecture, according to Santa Barbara architect Lawrence Thompson, who has a 4-year-old daughter.

In contrast to the sleek, modernistic styling popular in the past several decades, Thompson sees a movement back to such traditional styles as Georgian and Victorian, styles that he said are made more for nurturing, with such architectural features as molding, arches, towers, nooks and window seats.

“These make kids feel more comfortable, more invited,” Thompson said. “Children have a small world. It brings it into their scale.”

Plus, Thompson feels that he benefits as well from sculpting a home that is nurturing for his child: “If it’s good for children, there’s got to be some good in it for adults. We don’t become robots. We still have feelings.”

To Laguna Beach architect Brian Dougherty, the most important thing children need is “space to be a kid,” which is increasingly difficult as families today “are living in smaller houses for the most part” due to the high cost of land and homes.

But to maintain within a home “certain places where kids are not welcome,” which Dougherty advocates, “there needs to be a space where kids can run free. The kids need a place to ride their trikes, an area to make messes, a place to be noisy without irritating their parents.”

At the minimum, Dougherty feels that children need a space that’s their own, even if it’s just “their own desk or their own corner.”

A private space is especially important when there are a lot of children in a family, and for a child “who has retarded or acting-out siblings,” said Dr. Carol Nagy Jaklin, the dean of USC’s Division of Social Sciences and a professor in the school’s psychology department.

“Problematic siblings get a lot more attention,” Jaklin said, “and they need to. But the normal siblings need to have their needs respected.”

A separate space to create and to make messes is also seen as important by psychotherapist Carson, who said it ties in with some parents’ attempt to reduce their children’s television-watching time.

“What are they going to be doing instead?” she asked. A place to play, to paint, to make collages would help, she explained, adding that children need a place to leave their projects, like those made of Legos or wooden blocks.

“That encourages them with their play,” she said. “If they have to tear it down afterward, it’s very disappointing.”

However, not everyone believes that fashioning a home that focuses on children’s needs is a good idea.

“I don’t think you have to turn your house around,” said Los Angeles interior designer Dagmar Dimster. “You integrate your child into the household by education and discipline.” When her three sons were small, she said, “they had to respect the way we lived.”

That sentiment is shared by Brentwood architect Susi Bahat, who has three young sons. While she believes that the home “should be geared so that children have their own spaces,” she has not altered the rest of her home to accommodate her sons’ needs.

“I feel this is a world where children participate in a grown-up society,” said Bahat, who is from Germany. “In Europe, not everything is geared to the child. The child fits into your life.” She sees this training as beneficial to her children, who she said have gone into adult-oriented spaces all over the world and felt comfortable.

While Carson acknowledges that adults require some adult spaces for their own well-being, she feels that each consideration in the home for a child’s needs has long-lasting implications.

“If you recognize (children’s) needs, you’re giving a clear message,” she said. “It gives them a sense that they’re not alone. That they matter as a person. That their life matters.”