Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Parenting in Cohousing

[Lynn Nadeau / Maraiah (welcome]

Port Townsend WA, long-established community.
This is a front-burner issue at RoseWind these days, but from a  
different angle.
We had a rule that 13 and under couldn't be in the Common House (CH)  
unsupervised, except just to do something like pick up mail. They we  
had a family move in, with a calm studious 13 year old. She wanted to  
cross the street to the CH and curl up with a book, away from her  
noisy younger siblings. Seemed like a no-brainer to say OK, 13 could  
be in the CH on their own.
Then a few years later, one of the group of young boys became 13 and  
would be found, with his younger sibs and with non-RoseWind kid  
friends, not just 'in the CH' but there for the purpose of playing  
violent video games on the big screen monitor.

We had no rules about whether a permitted 13 could then qualify as  
supervision of others. Never came up before.

AND we had some folks intensely upset to see CH space used for games  
like Halo, with tanks blasting "soldiers" dead.

Various meetings with parents and nonparents led to quite a spectrum  
of beliefs getting expressed. Some of our families consciously choose  
to give their children more liberty than folks like me think is  
appropriate. Those parents ask that we "treat the kids like anyone  
else" and let them be "innocent until proven guilty", and "let them  
learn from their mistakes." On the other end are those - mostly  
nonparents - who feel that graduated privileges go with graduated  
maturity of judgment, We've had various instances of damage in the CH  
that sure looked like kid doings: kids' names scratched on porch  
furniture, written on the bulletin board surface, ping pong paddles  
with the rubber all peeled off, a pushed out screen in a bathroom  
window, ping pong balls crushed. Nothing huge, but there are those who  
say we can't prove it was kids, and we don't want them to feel singled  
out for criticism and judgement. That it would be bad to require the  
kids to make it right.

The upshot of all this is that we accepted that kids ARE using the CH  
unsupervised, so we should try out letting that be ok, at the  
discretion of the parents. (There seemed to be some agreement they  
shouldn't be in the kitchen unsupervised. We already have a well- 
observed rule against leaving any alcohol in the CH between  
gatherings. )

The violent video game bit is still being worked on by a task force.  
Some are as adamantly against any form of censorship, as others are  
sure that allowing such video in the CH is training the children to be  
killers and think violently. (The games belong to the kids and their  
parents allow them.) I'm not sure where this is leading, but it's  
definitely "up" -- the whole matter of how much and how other adults  
should play roles in the kids' lives. Most of the kids circulate in  
groups of kids, with relatively little apparent interest in being or  
becoming part of the community. Some of their parents don't  
participate much either.

Maraiah Lynn Nadeau