Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Re: more perspective on rules and regs

[Diane (dianeclaire]

That is a very slippery slope you're.   The State that writes rules about
picking up babies so many times a day just so it can have a rule that
permits it to close down the really bad day care facilities is also writing
a rule that will allow a really bad inspector to collect graft and in other
ways intimidate the really good day care establishments.

Diane Margolis
Cambridge Cohousing


On 4/21/06, Robert Moskowitz <robertm [at] knowledgetree.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,.
>
> There has been a lot of discussion in the past few days on rules and
> regulations, which I have found interesting and enlightening. But I
> haven't seen anybody yet say something which I think is very sensible
> and not widely understood about rules and regulations. So I'm going to
> say it:
>
> Many years ago, I lived in Philadelphia and knew a bunch of social
> workers. At the time, the State passed a law covering babies in child
> care centers: mandating how many times a day they had to be picked up,
> and so forth.
>
> I vehemently ridiculed and criticized this law to my social worker
> friends, saying it wasn't possible or sensible to tell someone how often
> a baby needed to be picked up, and making similar arguments about all
> the other provisions of the law, too.
>
> That's when one of my friends told me the wisdom of this kind of rule.
>
> "It's not," she told me, "so I can watch how a particular day care
> center operates and cite them for not picking up the babies often
> enough. It's so I can go into a day care center and see that they're
> doing a terrible job of caring for the children there, and then have
> something concrete to point to as a reason for closing them down."
>
> In other words, no one was going to close down a day care center simply
> because they weren't following the letter of the law. Instead, they
> would make reasonable judgment calls about which were the good day care
> centers and which were not, and then would use the law only as
> ammunition to close down the bad day care centers.
>
> In the same way, cohousing rules and regulations should not be written
> to specify and control how many times a week a person has to wash a dish
> or how she uses the community room. They should be written to be used as
> concrete reasons to institute sanctions against cohousing members who
> aren't cooperating, aren't participating, and aren't generally doing a
> "good job" of being part of the community.
>
> Once you understand this, you recognize that you don't have to
> anticipate or specify every detail of what is required of good cohousing
> participants. You only have to draw lines in the sand so that someone
> who isn't a good cohousing participant can be cited for the concrete act
> of stepping over them.
>
> To my mind, this perspective changes the whole role of rules and
> regulations in the community.
>
> Your thoughts?
>
> Robert
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
> http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/
>
>
>