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

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

kaiann <kaiann [at] sonic.net>
is the author of the message below.
It was posted by Fred the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org>
--------------------  FORWARDED MESSAGE FOLLOWS --------------------

Hi
    Yulupa Cohousing has been up and running for almost 2yrs.  We currently
have 12 kids ranging in age from 3 to 15yrs, with 42 adults (20's to 80's).
There are several grandchildren that also visit, as well as teens/young
adults who have "graduated" and live mostly somewhere else.

    What we've done regarding children and adults in community:

1--Kids and Adults in Community-Our Guidelines

We spent many Parents-Kids Committee meetings discussing Guidelines for our
kids and the adults in our community.  Discussed it with the group as a
whole as well several times.  We--adults and kids--felt frustration with
coming up with a long list of what seemed like "rules".  Then we returned to
talking about values and decided that this was a better approach.  In our
interactions with our children, we want to consider these values Respect,
Safety, Nuturance, Peaceful Resolution, Consideration, and Tolerance. (We
made a pneumonic to help us remember:  Raising Sensitive Children Takes
Parents and Neighbors).  (There is a diagram below if it showed up OK).  We
are working on teaching use of the values in interactions.






2--Play Structure:  Before move-in, we wanted to have a play structure for
the kids.  The amount of land we have is quite small.  We had lots of
discussions in the General Meetings, and Parents-Kids Committee about this
issue.  We were (finally) able to come to resolution about this (issues of
where to put it, who could use it, what hours, noise, safety, insurance)
about 15mos after move-in.  It provided a focus for discussion about kids in
community.

3--We also had a Workshop where these issues were discussed with a
facilitator and also another time with our own facilitators.  People's
concerns about the kids seem to deal with:  noise (again, we're 29 units on
less than 2 acres of land), where the kids can play, cleaning up kids'
messes, anger vs. constructive feedback to the kids, involvement when it is
not your kid, kids and weapons (swords, sticks, water guns), safety issues
(trying not to run over kids in the parking lot), activities for adults
only, when can an adult tell a kid to stop doing something, etc.

4--We also like to focus on how we can better include kids in community.
-We have a Kids Committee (split into older and younger) that meets once a
week for a short amount of time with another adult/parent in the community
(it's wonderful how this was started by members who have adult kids,
grandkids).  We try to teach a value and eat a snack and have fun.
-We've also cleared the Common House dining area of tables and chairs so
that kids have a larger inside place to play, run, roll around on wheeled
chairs, especially during the rainy times. (We have a kids room, but it's no
big enough for big activity).
-We had a "coming of age" ceremony/celebration for one of our kids at age
15.
-We try to plan kid events that also include/are interesting for adults.
-Having some of the older kids help out with cooking (not real interested in
the clean-up part); sometimes the younger kids can help with the cooking
also.
-We've tried to have a "homework club" where adults in community help kids
with their homework, but this has not really worked out.
-We've also periodically brought the kids to our General Meetings and put
them in the center of the room and had the adults give them positive
feedback/strokes to let them know how much we appreciate them, and how
important they are in the community.  This probably helped out for some of
the pre-teen/teens who were feeling constricted by the "rules" that we had
then, feel that the only feedback they got was negative.

This all is still a work in progress, but we are talking about issues, and
working on better interactions.

Kai at Yulupa
----- Original Message -----
From: "Becky M. Pulito" <Becky [at] Pulito.us>
To: <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 8:30 PM
Subject: [C-L]_ Inter-generational Integration efforts


> Hello!  I have a question to pose mainly geared towards established (aka,
> built and moved-in) communities.  But if you have an opinion or idea, and
> you are pre-move-in, I am of course interested in your information as
> well.
> Bear with me. I cannot find a way to ask this question in a simple
> sentence
> or two, so here goes.
>
>
>
> I am interested to know what, if anything, your community did to prepare
> your members for living together in community, particularly in regards to
> children.  Did you hold a discussion about expectations, concerns,
> requests?
> If you have policies or guidelines addressing concerns around children
> specifically, did you formulate them before move-in, and if so, how?  And
> if
> you intentionally did not create such policy/guidelines, what was your
> reasoning?  How did you learn what the wants and needs were within your
> membership?  How did you address such a delicate subject?
>
>
>
> We have families with children, and we have couples and singles without
> children.  We haven't expressly communicated about any expectations or
> concerns we may have.  I'm sure we all have different ideas of "the way
> things will be".  We need to communicate.  We are having a hard time
> finding
> a good way to do that.  Our meetings have a distinctly businesslike feel,
> so
> we are having difficulty figuring out how a discussion such as this could
> fit into our typical meeting structure.  We've considered creative ways of
> integrating adults and children in certain activities, but some members
> bristle at the idea of forced or artificial integration.  How to smooth
> the
> communication pathways and figure out. whatever we need to figure out??
>
>
>
> Many thanks,
>
> ~Becky, Camelot Cohousing, Berlin, MA
>
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