Cohousing-L Mailing List: Guidelines on Children

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

I received a question off list from a new community asking about guidelines for 
children. I started writing and decided I would write for a large audience 
since this subject hasn’t come up recently.

Many years ago, about 5 years after we moved into Takoma Village, a group of 
parents began meeting to develop guidelines for parents and children. We were 
fortunate and challenged by having many children including newly adopted older 
children and a good number of single parents by choice. Within the space of 3 
years, we had added 20 children aged 0-10 who were all living in new homes with 
new parents. 

The parents were never able to achieve a consensus amongst themselves on a set 
of guidelines and had only one wider discussion. Most of the issues were so 
volatile for one parent or non-parent that group discussions went off the rails 
easily. 

Not all of this was because we were trying to cope with one of the Touchy Three 
P’s: Parents, Pesticides, and Pets. It was from confronting our newly realized 
diversity. Cohousing communities begin with more diversity than they will ever 
have again. By the time we could have all agreed on written guidelines, the 
kids would have been grown and moved on. In fact, our first newborns are 
graduating from college this year and we still have no guidelines.

Sharing the issues might help:

1. No one realizes how diverse we all are until we get together and start 
talking about making rules, even if we call them “guidelines” or “shared 
wisdom.”

2. What appears to be a workable ideal is a moving target. Babies change from 
hour to hour. Toddlers have new bodies every month. Teenagers sprout a new 
radically anti-social personality seasonally. Parents have to re-organize.

3. Whatever new parents believe, they believe wholeheartedly. Raising children 
is a life-or-death situation. If you don’t do it exactly right, your children 
will become serial killers or no-names. It is all decided in the first year of 
life.

4. Only parents of young children are recognized as parents. All those other 
adults who may have raised dozens of children themselves are not parents. 
Efforts by non-parents to help define appropriate behavior in space or time 
will be seen as anti-child. Anti-freedom. Anti-exuberance. Anti-life.

5. Parents have the exclusive right to correct their children’s behavior. Some 
parents find it helpful and welcome when another adult says, "Jimmy, we don’t 
jump on the furniture in the Common House.” Others will fume for months and 
years no matter how quietly or kindly it is said. 

6. It takes a village to raise a child and always has. Some parents are shocked 
at the suggestion that their baby would benefit from birth by being held and 
forming relationships with other adults and older children. Others are shocked 
that people in cohousing did not move in to become childcare workers on 
evenings, weekends, and all school holidays, even if parents are not working.

7.  Cohousing is child-friendly, not child-centered. Some parents think 
cohousing should be a child paradise, a haven for all things happy and free, 
never a harsh word spoken to or in the presence of a child. Others consider it 
the ideal place to learn how to resolve arguments sensibly and understand the 
needs of others. To learn about sustainability. To learn to share the work. To 
create and organize a project. To participate in activities that wouldn’t be 
available in other settings but to do so as an adult, not a privileged being 
who rules the roost.

8. Children should work out their arguments without adult interference. Or 
children should have help working out arguments and offsetting the strength of 
older, more verbal, more physical children.

All these conflicting views sound like cohousing must be impossible, but we are 
all doing fine and the children who have grown up so far are doing fine. They 
are doing differently, however, each going their own way. Some going to 
college, some not. Some taking gap years and others taking many.

The very best thing has been seeing how these conflicts sort themselves out 
over time. Talking about things without expecting to end up with a rule is the 
best solution. When everyone is communicating, rules sort themselves out.

The few rules that have been "enforced” are things like everyone wearing a 
helmet when riding anything with wheels. Younger children to develop the habit 
even if a helmet seems unnecessary. And the adults and older teens as an 
example for the younger children. These are mostly popular culture-forward 
values that are difficult to argue with even if one thinks they are stupid (a 
word that schools don’t allow and some children will remind you not to say). 
But even these are not written down.

These are my views only. Other Takoma Villagers will have different opinions 
and different views of history.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org