Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cleaning up and other kid issues

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Welcome to Cohousing, the home of multiple parenting and all the 
confusion inherent thereof.

1. Our clean up routine is pretty minimal.  We also removed most 
everything out of the kids space, they have much more fun playing make 
believe. We occasionally have special projects which are adult 
initiated.  One idea for pick up which works sometimes in my house (I 
have 3 and 6 year old
entropy machines) is that anything I have to pick up, gets put away for 
a week.  Usually a couple of put aways get the point across pretty well 
and things get picked up - for awhile....

2. We are in denial about teenagers still........(We have 1)
        
3. non-cohousing neighborhood kids are probably one of the biggest 
headaches parents have.  Mostly problems with deliberate infractions of 
the rules, which are done to test the boundaries.  The best response we 
have had is getting into discussions with the parents of the 
neighborhood kids.  This is very effective as the kid then is on notice 
that we are talking and anything they do in our neighborhood comes home 
to mom or dad.  We occasionally have told neighborhood kids that have 
lost their privileges to play here until X.  This also has been 
effective.  We have not ever had a neighborhood kid inside our current 
basement commonhouse, and I doubt the kids room in the under 
construction commmonhouse will be a place they will go.

4. The toy gun debate: This is self policing. In our neighborhood, the 
kids decided that  its just not cool to play with guns, and those kids 
that do tend to get shunned by other kids. They figure it out pretty 
quickly.  The parents have nothing to do with enforcing this standard, 
the kids do it themselves.  We do have waterfights with balloons, 
hoses, supersoakers, buckets, etc.  These are water fights and are not 
treated as gun battles.


Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood