Part of the joy of a new baby is designing the new nursery. There are a lot of decisions that go into making sure that the room is a safe and fun place that positively encourages your child’s intellectual and emotional growth. One of the most fundamental aspects of stimulating that growth is color.
For decades, wall art decor for nurseries has been bland and formulaic, dictated by arbitrary gender norms. More recently, however, parents-to-be have been shifting paradigms and breaking out of old ways of thinking. As a result, new and creative color combinations have become more popular in nurseries. Here are some tips for combining nursery colors in fun and creative ways.
Look To Nature for Inspiration
The next time you are in your flower garden or visit a park, take a good look around you. If you look carefully, you may find that nature typically combines colors considered to be complementary, i.e., those opposite one another on the color wheel and considered to be most attractive when paired. For example, purple flowers, such as violets and lilacs, often have yellow centers, while holly plants have green leaves and red berries. It may not be practical or safe to put fresh flowers in your baby’s room every day, but you can create the same effect with floral wallpaper for walls.
Break Free of Gender Expectations
For years, the color scheme of a baby’s nursery depended primarily on his or her sex: Pink for girls and blue for boys. Once it became possible to identify a baby’s sex prior to birth, the insistence on choosing colors associated with gender became even more pronounced.
However, there are a lot of problems with the pink/blue dichotomy. It’s limiting and puts a lot of unreasonable expectations on your child from the moment you lay him or her in the cradle. It’s also completely arbitrary, being a marketing tool created by department stores in the mid-20th century.
Consider the Color’s Effects
Instead of indoctrinating a child into a gender dichotomy from birth, choose colors based on the effects that they have on your child’s mind. For example, green and purple are calming colors, while pale yellow promotes good cheer, although it can become overstimulating if it becomes too bright. For obvious reasons, you want the nursery to be a restful place where you child feels happy, so some combination of these colors may help you achieve that objective.
Look to the Future
Chances are good that your child’s nursery will eventually become his or her bedroom or play area. Therefore, you should choose colors and decor that will age well as your child grows. One effective way of doing this is to choose neutral colors and then apply adhesive wallpaper on top of it. The removable wall treatment can stay up as long as your child still wants it to be there. However, if your child eventually decides to take it down, it comes off the wall easily, leaving no trace behind.
Since you don’t know much about a new baby’s personality on first bringing him or her home, the nursery will probably be more reflective of you at first. Removable wallpaper from online retailers helps you change your room to suit your child’s tastes without having to make major updates.