Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Inter-generational Integration efforts

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On 4/15/07 12:54 PM, "dahako [at] aol.com" <dahako [at] aol.com> wrote:

>  In general, I'm a fan of Rob Sandelin's advice to not make more rules than
> you need to before you move in. For child policy especially, until your
> community makes the transition from talking about "this family's kids" to "our
> community's kids", you will not get the rules right anyway.

What I would add to Jessie's wonderful account is that you don't always need
rules to make changes. Just a discussion of how people feel is often enough.

For example, kids in meetings. It was hard for parents of little kids to
understand that people without little kids have a hard time tuning them out.
A crying baby to a parent is a crying baby. A crying baby to someone who has
never been a parent is an emergency and very distracting.

We didn't need a rule to address this, we just needed parents to be more
aware. And we worked harder to provide child care during meetings.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing
http://www.takomavillage.org