Highlights
Fantasies of tiny home living often favor open roads, nature-filled settings, and a willingness to throw societal norms to the winds. Can kids fit into this ideal? People do raise kids in a small space, from infants to families of four or more. Think through your own expectations, plans, and specific needs before deciding whether to do it yourself.
Consider Your Own Childhood
Many parents today take steps to learn from their own childhood experiences. What aspects of your, or your partner’s, early life feels like a model for your own little ones? Which do you hope to do better?
The more intentional your decisions around your own pasts, the more successfully you can chart a meaningful way forward. Raising children, in any setting, comes with challenges and joys. Think through how it ideally looks for you, and how a tiny house may, or may not, support your vision.
Connection Versus Privacy
Many conversations around tiny home living, especially with kids, center around the themes of connection versus privacy. Smaller spaces, by nature, bring people together. They also present challenges when individuals, or couples, need time to themselves. Think through how best to navigate these contrasts when considering where to raise your family or preparing to move into a tiny house.
Close Family Ties With Your Tiny House Family
Because it’s harder to retreat from each other, your family will be closer. You’ll need to address conflict rather than walking away from it. Challenges, such as making dinner in a tiny kitchen, will require everyone to be part of the solution.
The reduced financial obligations of tiny home living could free up time to spend with your family. By choosing to spend less money on your home, you might work less, or change to a more fulfilling, but less lucrative, career.
Infants And Toddlers Thrive on Togetherness
Infants and toddlers need closeness above all else. They completely depend on others to feed, dress, change, and protect them. Small homes translate to fewer times small children are alone and might get into trouble. Having their needs met with sensitivity and responsiveness gives tiny ones a sense of confidence, security, and love.
Everyone Needs a Bit of Privacy
Togetherness works best if it’s voluntary. Work into your routine ways to get some space. Take turns being the first one up in the morning, and take the kids out for a walk while the other gets some sleep. Get a bit of help from a friend, relative, neighbor, or babysitter and go out now and then, for couple-time or alone-time.
Concrete Tips to Keep Your Tiny Child Safe
With each inch of your small home called into active duty, take baby-proofing seriously. Some common features of tiny houses, like ladders to get into loft spaces, may not be realistic for very small children. Lofts call for strong baby gates and a railing around them with no baby-sized gaps.
Poisonous and hazardous materials should occupy a separate spot up off the ground or safely protected with baby locks. Look for dangers in nature or around nearby homes if your life is lived more frequently outside.
Your Tiny House Family: Roots Versus Experiences
While the youngest children orient themselves primarily to their caregivers, as kids grow, they start to put down roots of their own in physical and social spaces. Keep their needs for stability in mind, especially should you want to take to the road in a tiny home on wheels.
Early Childhoods Include Friends
As kids grow a bit, their needs expand to include friends outside the family. They begin to truly play with others, and alternate between cooperating with and demanding things of their parents. The bigger scale of their emotional lives points many parents to consider preschool. Others build friendships with families, explore group play settings, and encourage sibling fun.
Consider School-Aged Kids’ Needs for Continuity and Stability
Adventures may call, like traveling in your tiny house on wheels and living near the beach for a summer, or hiking to and fishing in a nearby lake. These types of activities enrich kids’ lives. Raising a family in a tiny home leads to hands-on experiences and exploring the natural world. Kids benefit from understanding that people in different places live equally relevant lives.
But as kids grow, their stronger friendships and activities outside of their immediate families require predictability to stay nourished.
Support as They Take On Responsibilities
Relating to a manageable version of the outside world means that school-aged kids can start to take on more responsibilities because they can more accurately predict what their days will bring. Ideally, they attend a single school from year to year, and find ways to see friends and extended family regularly. While not every family follows this pattern, experts agree that stability forms one of the core needs of kids.
Children this age explore the world then tell increasingly complex, detailed stories about it to their families. Having a safe, nurturing home in a secure and predictable location allows them to recharge before facing the world again.
Create Time and Space Routines
When considering a tiny home for school-aged kids, consider where they’ll attend school. Look for a consistent community if you’re home-schooling. Plan where they’ll play with friends who visit, and if the answer is outside, how this changes on a cold or stormy day.
When and where will they find the quiet and space to do homework? Does your location, or your home itself, include a strong internet connection for their assignments? Establish weekly and daily routines for work, school, and hobbies to keep your tiny house family rolling along.
Teens Need Privacy As They Move Toward Independence
The push and pull of adolescence means that teens need privacy to start to separate from their parents, but also continued understanding and support. Tiny homes present unique challenges. Planning ahead for this stage of your family may mean choosing a larger dwelling upfront. Find one with walls that go up to the ceiling, separate bedrooms, and room to socialize.
Don’t get so caught up in the tiny lifestyle that you overlook obvious needs of your soon-to-be-adults, and give them respect and a stronger voice about decisions that affect them.
If needed, look into ways to add another room, attached to or next to your primary home, to give your teens a place to call their own.
Parents Need Support, Too
Raising a family in a tiny home isn’t easy. The best parents get their own needs met. You may defer some of these while rightly focused on feeding and protecting your kids. Beware – they tend to stack up over time.
Find ways to get support from other parents, friends, or a tiny home community. But be ready to rethink things if you reach your limits. There’s no competition to tough it out the most or an eco-prize for extreme family off-gridding. Be gentle with yourself and remember your kids need you to be OK. So do what you must to keep this way.
As Jen McCarthy, Owner of Teacup Tiny Homes, wrote on the topic, “Tiny living – with or without kids – is the same as living in a traditional house; it’s just more saturated.”
Make sure it’s saturated with love.
See Our Other Wellness Posts
- 5 Ways to Live With Intention
- 8 Relationship Tips: How to Live in a Tiny House Together
- Preparing to Move Into a Tiny House
- Having a Bad Day In Your Tiny House?
