Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Child access to Common House

[Elizabeth Stevenson (tamgoddess]

I know we've discussed this several times before, so you may want to look at
the archives again. Here's what we've done.

When we moved in, we had a significant number of teenagers who were not
raised in cohousing, obviously. They were all fairly new to each other, and
we were new to the neighborhood, so we had a lot of adjustments to make. We
started out with a dedicated teen room. It got cleaned up occasionally, but
mostly by one teen girl who wanted it to look good. WE also had an incident
where neighborhood teens came in and defaced the walls. This is a very
abbreviated version, keep in mind. there were lots of other reasons that we
decided to no longer keep it a dedicated teen room, including poor behavior
by some teens. 

We now have the room as a multi-purpose room, where the teens can go and
watch a video or hang out. They keep it clean. The teens we have now have
grown up in the community and are an integral part of it. They might grumble
behind our backs occasionally, but they are not rebellious and have used the
room responsibly, as far as I know! For our purposes, the teens are
considered anyone over the age of 11. They are allowed in the CH alone, but
a parent must know about it. They aren't perfect, but we trust them to
generally behave. Children under 11 must be accompanied by an adult, and are
not allowed in TRFKATTR (The Room Formerly Known As The Teen Room). Uh, we
usually just call it the upstairs room...

Our CH is locked at all times, being in an urban neighborhood. So this is an
easy to enforce policy. Kids just don't have keys unless their parents give
them one. 

I think keeping the teens out will alienate them, but allowing complete free
access is trouble. Finding that middle ground is the challenge, and one that
the teens themselves will need to be included in, or you won't get any
buy-in from them. I'd be careful to set up ground rules about expected
behavior and clean-up responsibilities, so that if there is a need to "take
back" the teen room, you have reasonable grounds that the teens have agreed
to in advance. It's nice to think about not having any rules, but kids do
better with clear boundaries. You can call it an agreement or whatever. A
contract. that's a must.

-- 
Liz Stevenson
Southside Park Cohousing
Sacramento, California
tamgoddess [at] attbi.com

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