Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Kids & work

[King Collins (greenmac]

Responding to the dialog about kids, teens and the work they should be
expected to do. and "looking down the road"

Michael M of Nyland said:

>Up front, my personal values include having my life be less fragmented and
>conflicted -- more integrated and holistic.  I suspect many of us share this
>goal.
>
>Given where most of us have come from -- from a single household minimally
>connected to other households, families, neighborhoods, subcultures, etc.,
>it's not
>surprising that we would see kids' roles being totally the responsibility of
>their parents.
>
>I'll bet as our communities mature that a balance of community and parental
>expectations will evolve re kids.  (I just moved into Nyland Cohousing as a
>renter in an existing family household, so I'll be getting real-life
>experience soon!)
>
>One of the many shortcomings of mainstream society is a dearth of rites of
>passage that mark the changes in freedoms and responsibilities when we enter
>a new life stage. ...

>Within a family, parents decide when kids have more rights, when bedtimes
>change, chores change and increase, etc.  Obviously schools vary their
>behavioral expectations as the child moves to each new grade.  Now we  if we
>allow community to also provide guidelines about what's expected at different
>ages - (guidelines that are consistent with home and school) then kids and
>teens can live within a more secure structure and have clear guidelines to
>help them transition to the next phase without a lot of rebellion and
>inter-generation wear and tear.
>
>A further evolution might be where schools are integrated into the
>(cohousing) community in a web of learning that is not separate from family
>and community except when young folks leave to pursue advanced education,
>apprenticeships or otherwise go outside the community.
>
>Can't stop trying to see down the road.

Well, that was pretty good. I, too, feel that the community shares, with
parents, a significant role in rasing and socializing children.  Not many
of us would chose to be so circumscribed as the Ahmish, but there must be
much to learn from them, the kind of people who really take family and
community seriously.

The individual subjectivity (the essence of you and I) seeks to realize
itself, and understands that it can only happen collectively. How does the
child realize this? He sees how the grown-ups deal with day-to-day chores.
In most societies the child is expected (forced, if necessary) to do his
share. How else could it be? How could human beings have survived if the
family and neighborhood did not work together? Therefore, requiring
responsibility of the young seems reasonable to me. How unnatural for a
child to simply do whatever he pleases. This can only happen in an
alienated situation, but we've all seen plenty of those.

Every parent goes through this reasoning, and we do not all agree (in spite
of these authoritative statements). We take positions on a sliding scale,
and we do so without much help from any cooperative community. But that is
what we need: a community of cooperating parents--with differences about
some things and agreement about others, in constant dialog, with some
matters decided and others being decided. All this in the context of a
healthy, lively, working community of people. A tribe, as it were.

For us, now, in our partial solutions and microsituations, it is an awesome
struggle. We know we are part of an immense world on the brink of
tumultuous change, a change that absolutely must happen if we are to have
the happiness we so desire. And so many of us are tied down by work that
keeps us away from a social life that could nurture our souls and inspire
our neighborhoods. The days rush by, and still there are times when it
feels like NOTHING is happening.

Even in the best of cohousing, our solutions are partial. So much is still
alienated, labor and confusion, as we each go our separate ways to pay the
mortgage.

Our children witness our dissatisfaction, and they see our paltry efforts
to live together cooperatively. They feel the alienation. They see that we
are slaves to the economy. They see all that and do not yet know how
unsatisfying the rest of the world is. They dream that they can have
everything without alienation, without work, without chores.

If you are like me, you are looking hard at what is coming down, wondering
when there will be a breakthrough, when cohousing and neighborhood and work
and democracy will become a clear agenda, a comprehendible problem for a
sizable minority of our population.

We are, mostly, at the mercy of the economy which must be remade. We cannot
reinvent the society alone. And yet our efforts together, these
microexperiments in cooperative living, are practically the only place
where the crucial questions of our time (ecology, agriculture, energy,
daily life, child rearing) can clearly be posed.

And this cyberdialog, going on 24 hours a day, is a way of trying to go
beyond, "beyond the point of no return." And I dare to believe that we are
close to that point where we will witness and be a part of the remaking of
all that now confronts us as immovable object, as alienation, as
unchangeable reality.

As the situation accelerates toward crisis, it reveals ponderable problems
and solutions that are on a scale commensurate with what must be done. As
these problems and solutions become clearly visible, our life together will
become palpable, understandable, real. Then we will find that child rearing
and socialization, and many other problems, will not be such conundrums,
and more often than not, our children will be with us.

In the meantime, we carry on, optimisticly, and hope that we, and our
children, do not lose our way.

king



King Collins and Joan Kelley
296 Gardens Ave.
Ukiah, CA 95482
Voice: (707) 462-4543
   Fax: (707) 462-6873
   Net: greenmac [at] pacific.net