Cohousing-L Mailing List: Preventing cohousing neighborly awareness from becoming surveillance

[Melanie Mindlin (sassetta]

I have a couple of community experiences to offer into this discussion. We had 
one case of police being called when a neighbor thought a household was being 
too noisy. The community as a whole was called upon to address this situation. 
While we didn’t use the word harassment in the proposal, we did agree to 
address the problem by sending a letter from our HOA “Board” to the police 
department. In this letter we informed them that our community has methods of 
addressing this kind of internal conflict and asked them to phone us (two 
numbers provided) in the case of future complaints. No more complaints were 
made.

Our community has always had quite a few children living here. We are now on 
our second round of young kids. The issue of free-range parenting has come up, 
and our community has made policies to limit the children’s range. 
Specifically, children are not allowed to go to several areas of our community 
without an adult being present to supervise. These are the common house, the 
fenced community garden, and the parking lot. Any adult who sees children in 
these areas will insist that they leave, and the culture around the 
restrictions is pretty strong. The children have open access to a playroom in 
the common house from an exterior door, though even this has been problematic 
as the room gets messed up and nobody knows who did it. Our children can, and 
do, run around outside as they please—almost always in groups because that’s 
more fun. The parking lot has been the hardest to monitor because it is 
tempting to go there to ride wheeled devices or travel quickly to the edge of 
the community. It’s also the most dangerous place because fast moving children 
are hard to spot when you’re backing out of a parking place. Kids in the 
parking lot get a lot of negative feedback.

In my opinion, it take a village to raise healthy children. Communities should 
take responsibility for the safety of the kids, but not ideally through 
criticism of overwhelmed parents. Your kitchen should have doors and 
child-proof devices if young children can go there. Significant safety hazards 
should be addressed as a community issue, not as a parent responsibility. Also, 
your larger community should consider ways to help you with parenting 
challenges. Surveillance of children can be a good thing if it’s done with the 
intention to assist parents in keeping children safe rather than a way to 
gather evidence of misbehavior. A compassionate conversation about how the 
community can help you rather than doling out judgment would be a good idea.

Children here have had accidents and gotten hurt. We did not blame the parents. 
We made rules about the dangerous behaviors and everyone here helped the 
parents make sure they didn’t do those things again. Kids will test the limits, 
especially physical limits, and accidents will happen. Parents can’t, and 
shouldn’t need to, watch their children every moment. Community agreement about 
rules on what kids can do will help keep kids safe.

Melanie