Thanks to this forum and some heavy lurking four years ago, my husband and I have been enjoying the best sleep of our lives these last four years! I am now back with a question about a mattress for our ten year old.
We are about to do the mattress shuffle at our house, moving the 10 year old’s mattress into our boys’ room and move the two boys into bunk beds. Because we live far from family, we have a lot of visitors throughout the year. The current options for visitors are a couch hideabed or an air mattress.
Because both sets of our parents come up for extended stays throughout the year, my husband suggested we get a full or queen sized mattress for our daughter so that our parents have more comfortable and supportive sleeping arrangements. One set of parents typically stays as much as a month in the summer.
My understanding is that children require a more supportive sleep surface for their development. However, with fibromyalgia and four knee replacements between all the grandparents, a soft surface would be ideal. Is there a good place to start as far as mattresses that would benefit both?
Growing children require good support, and for a 10 year old I’d generally lean toward a medium/medium-firm surface comfort. This doesn’t have to be a surface that feels very hard, but if your parents require a bit more surface plushness (and of course you could determine this after they visited and gave you their opinion of the new mattress), you could provide some extra plushness with a 2"-3" latex topper. I’d recommend latex versus memory foam or polyfoam for ease of repositioning (better resilience), which can be more challenging as we become older. Otherwise, the same guidelines would apply as presented in the mattress shopping tutorial.
