Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Parenting in Cohousing

[Lyle Scheer (wonko]

On 6/13/11 9:55 AM, Diana Carroll wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Lyle Scheer <wonko [at] monkeyhouse.org> 
> wrote:
>
>> Seems like quite a generic parenting question, no co-housing required.
>>
> Well, no, because the question is how the community should handle common
> resources in the context of the generic parenting question.  Common
> resources are a co--housing specific issue.  If your teen is watching too
> much TV at timmy's house, you can talk to timmy's mom, or just keep Joey
> from visiting Timmy.  In this case, the role of "Timmy's Mom" is being
> played by, say, 50 other adults.
Aye.  This is where my opinion begins to leak in.  IMO, it's not timmy's
mom, nor is it the cohousing community with the ultimate responsibility
nor with the ultimate ability to do something about it.  That lies with
the parents.

Certainly, requests can be made, and either accepted, rejected, or
modified.
>> o Dealing with a request from a parent to the community regarding access
>> restrictions.  Seems rather straightforward, and the community can
>> choose to accommodate the parents request or not, depending on how it
>> might affect other users usage.  ...
>>
>> I'm not quite sure what there is here to discuss.
>>
> You just identified what there is to discuss: "a request from the parent to
> the community", the response to which is not at ALL straightforward.  Of
> course  the "community can choose"...that's the question I think Sharon is
> posing: how does YOUR community choose in these cases?
>
> We have lots of experience with parents making requests of the community (as
> well as the community making requests of the parents).  I don't find
> resolving this to be at all "straightforward".  To the contrary, these
> questions can become heated and divisive. :-(
>
The discussion and the resolution may not be straightforward, but the
process should be.  A request should be made and the community discusses
it and ultimately accepts, rejects, or modifies it.

However, as my opinion is showing above... I still feel this is
ultimately up to the parents, and while there can be contention around
the community not accepting the parent's request, that's more of an
internal communal matter and not really a parenting thing at all.  It's
more about how the community relates to each other than it is about
parenting.

Any issue that a parent has with a child can be dealt with between that
parent and that child, with no need for anyone else to be involved.

I suspect the breakdown happens where there is an expectation from the
parent for the community to deal with their child and the community, in
whole or in part, is not willing to take this on.  My perspective with
that is that the parent needs to get over it and deal with the parenting.

I could liken this to the greater society and law breaking, but it seems
to me that this is clear as well.  We have a clearly defined system
where if laws are broken, and the breaker of the law is caught,
consequences happen (may not happen immediately, but it seems that if
laws are broken regularly, eventually this will catch up with you). 
Similarly, without regard for parenting issues, if a cohousing policy is
broken, most cohousing groups have consequences.  It may test that
group's policies and dispute resolution mechanisms, but that sort of
test is perhaps a chance to do good for both the policy and dispute
resolution mechanisms.  I believe there is also room to revisit policies
that are not working, to either reaffirm them, modify them, or abandon them.

I suspect this heat and divisiveness comes more from differing
expectations on what a community is to provide to "me", or what "I" am
expected to provide the community than anything else.  I would further
speculate that I could determine exactly what my neighbor is willing to
provide to me by talking to them.  I personally would understand
anything like this to be a request and not an entitlement, and would
tend to accept and work with whichever answer I get.  I can only
speculate that that the heat and divisiveness comes from an expected
entitlement unfulfilled.  I do my best to try not to expect any such
entitlement, and find for the most part that I do not end up with
resentments or unfulfilled expectations.

I would actually go further, and state that this is not really a
discussion on parenting per se, but really a discussion of common
community standards.  We also have the issue of "how do you define that
the floor of the common house is clean?"  Nothing to do with kids, but
differing ideas and feelings around if this participation task is complete.

Achieving consensus on standards issues, as I call it, seems to be a
major challenge for communities for communication and actual reaching of
consensus, and I suspect continual work is called for in any community. 
This is also an area where diversity is challenged, and indeed in
earlier threads queried by Wayne Tyson, where his question regarding
authoritarianism versus egalitarianism or pluralism hits the highway, as
it were.

- Lyle