Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Is cohousing life easier or

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

"Laura Bagnall"  <netmail!Laura_Bagnall [at] terc.edu> wrote:
What has been the experience of people in existing cohousing
communities?

What I wrote earlier was in reference to the cohousing  creation 
process. Living in community, while it still has its challenges, offers 
tremendous opportunities for benefit for parents. As a parent of two 
girls, ages 2 and 5 I could not even imagine living in a regular neighborhood.

Sharingwood has a childcare coop system set up, our own playground 
(which attracts many of the kids from up the street who are not 
community members), and offers enourmous security - where every adult 
in the community knows my children and cares for them.

For example just yesterday, my five year old got cooking lessons from a 
neighbor, helped another neighbor with her flower garden and spent two 
hours with yet another adult learning how to make paper cutouts.  There 
are 3 "grandma's" in our community who do special things on each kids 
birthday and there is a whole herd of kids to play with.(10 community 
kids plus 5-8 neighbors from up the road).

We have parent meetings where we talk about kid issues  and there is a 
lot of wonderful support. One of our members is a professional family 
counselor who offers some good resources and modelling.  We have had a 
couple get divorced in the community, and both of them stayed! They 
live in different houses now  and the kids went on with life with very 
little change. During the most difficult time, both parents got equal 
and very close emotional support from the group.

The challenges, at least at Sharingwood, seem to revolve on how to deal 
with differing parenting styles.  Some expect more control and have 
different behavioral expectations than others do and working these out 
can be thorny. I personally have a hard time when someone else comments 
on my parenting and I would suspect that is felt by many.  However, 
some of the parents have learned some parenting behavior from seeing it 
modelled by the other parents and I think overall the benefit for the 
kids has been positive.

Another challenge for us is dealing with the neighborhood kids using 
our facilities and also their behaivor. We have some general rules such 
as no loose dogs (there is a dog tie up post by the playground), and 
don't allow toy guns, fighting, etc.  There have been some problems 
with a couple of the neighborhood boys which we are still figuring out 
how to deal with.

Childcare for meetings has worked out well for us, we hire a local 
teenager (or two) and assign one adult the task of putting together a 
snack.  Childcare is paid for out of the community budget.(monthly 
assessments) The community also has a capital improvement fund which we 
used to build the playground and are planning to build a play house, 
another climber and a tree house this summer.

One of the children in our community has had cancer (in remission) and 
other has Attention Deficit Disorder.  We have supported the parents 
and worked together as a group to create a good environment which meets 
the special needs of those kids. We do a monthly sharing circle which 
is a good forum for people to release their feelings (See the current 
issue of Cohousing Magazine for details of how that works)

We have done some special kids events such as trips to the zoo, hikes, 
lots of nature hike type stuff (I'm a naturalist by avocation), 
campfire storytelling and even put on a community play.
Community dinner is a real plus, our teams cook one day a week and then 
you just go and eat the rest of the week (Mon-Thursday with Friday 
being left-over night.) This means swim lessons or baseball can go 
right up until 6pm if its not your teams night to cook.

Having other parents around, who you know well and can really talk with 
is a tremendous resource.  It is generally easy to find someone to 
watch your kids if you need a break and the kinds of things the kids 
get to experience with all the adults really supports the notion that: 
"It takes a whole village to raise a healthy child".