Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Age-restricted access to common house?

[Kay Argyle (Kay.Argyle]

At Wasatch Commons in Salt Lake City, an adult-in-charge must be in the
building, not necessarily in the same room, when kids are in the common
house.  

The community defers to the parents' judgment on the rules, partly because
the parents have sometimes been stricter than anyone else.  There was
discussion once about adding a lock on the interior door to the kids room,
changing the outside lock, and letting kids have that key and come and go
without supervision, but parents were leery even of that -- particularly
given the climbing wall and loft in that room.

Slumber parties have periodic parental checks if not an adult on the
premises.

Unsupervised access is granted case-by-case, on need, for instance to
practice piano or do laundry. A teen gets their own key when they choose to
participate in community work on a regular basis, the idea being that
mature, responsible teens will self-select.  (One fifteen-year-old had a key
while her older sibling did not.)  The mail room has an unlocked outside
entrance and a deadbolted interior door. (We wheedled the mail carrier into
putting packages inside the locked door with permission to use our
restroom.)

Kids get shooed out of the kitchen during cooking, and away from the
dishwasher during cleanup (big heavy racks of breakables at scalding
temperature).

For a couple of years, we had a "double-digit" room (ten and older) upstairs
of the workshop. I'm not sure if kids actually had a key, or if parents
unlocked the door upon request, but they weren't expected to stick around.
The agreement was that kids could go in a straight line, hands in pockets,
to the stairs, and shouldn't go into the garage side at all (power tools,
gasoline, solvents .... This may have been after the owner of the table saw
and router moved away).  Tentative discussions about remodeling a separate
entrance for the stairs faded when the furniture got trashed; after the TV
was destroyed and the kids wouldn't say who was responsible (except that it
was a guest), the room was repurposed.  

Other issues include sex in the guest room; an unauthorized teen party that
left broken furniture and holes in the dry wall (aside from her
embarrassment that everyone knew, her parents required the hostess to pay
for part of the repairs); and porn site surfing on the office computer
(which came to light when the next user, an eight-year-old doing homework,
got "you may be interested in -" suggestions).  

The office and the workshop now have a separate key from the common house
entrances. The guest rooms already had a separate key, but started being
kept locked. No alcohol gets left in the common house.

We currently only have about three teens and three grade-schoolers.  The
youngsters who moved in eighteen years ago, a horde of seven and eight year
olds and a scatter of other ages, have been returning to hold their wedding
receptions in our common house.

Kay