Tag: Children


Seeking Home… Away From Home

Nine months ago, our family moved from Los Angeles to Albuquerque to be part of Cohousing ABQ  before the homes are built.  The move with our two little kids, aged 2 and 5, was rough. There was serious drama with the moving company, and the night we arrived our dog was lost, frightened by the... Read More Read More

A Context for Hope: The Gift of a Cohousing Childhood

The Winter 2021 issue of “Communities” landed in our mailbox this month, and I was immediately taken by the theme: “Children in Community.” What a bonanza! Stories written by both parents and (now) adult children who grew up in community fill these pages. Over and over, one message kept coming up: the benefits of a... Read More

Jenny Bevacqua – Portland, OR

I’m a mother, activist, and Pediatric Nurse Practitioner in Portland, Oregon. I live in a forested cohousing community with my partner, 2 sons and our elderly dog. We choose cohousing because it aligns with our values as well as desires for community. Our individualistic culture seems to be damaging our society, via isolation and disconnection.... Read More

Raising kids in cohousing

For most of my daughter’s life she has known about cohousing. We moved in when she was 9. But we had been planning it since she was 3. During construction she asked me almost daily whether she was going to (fill in the blank) or tell me what she was going to do when we... Read More

Raising Kids in Community

Sometimes people will ask my kids what it’s like growing up in cohousing and they receive a blank stare. Not because they asked a question of a 15 year old and 17 year old, but because my kids know no other life, except in cohousing. My oldest was two years old when we moved into... Read More

New Marketing Messages

There’s a funny thing about cohousing. When you look at typical cohousing marketing, you see messages about what it is like to live in community: private homes, shared common space, know your neighbors. But when you ask people why they live in cohousing, the conversation goes someplace else: Cohousing supports democracy, it makes me a... Read More

Kids and Seniors make great community

For most families it is easy to imagine the benefits of sharing a cohousing community with other families with kids the same age. Naturally the kids will play together, the parents will have peers moving through the same stages together, and carpooling to activities is likely. I want to take a moment to write about... Read More

Foster Parenting in Cohousing

This story was written in 2003 and first published in David Wann’s book Reinventing Community: Stories from the Walkways of Cohousing. We are republishing it here with permission because it is such a great example of how cohousing communities nurture and support beyond the community itself. We’ve been living with foster children in our house... Read More

Cohousing Policies

What shall we discuss as we are forming our communities? Every forming community (I hope!) asks this question and communities that have already moved in give lots of different answers. Many of those answers are in the form of “I wish we’d resolved this” and “we decided x which was irrelevant and should have decided... Read More

Kids Shared Spaces

  Don’t Let Your Kids Space Become an Afterthought! Wild Sage had some cool things in our kids space, we took a small plain square room and built a loft, we added an old library ladder to access it, we painted each wall a different color and painted sparkly clouds on the ceiling…but is it... Read More