One reason not stated by the author is that U.S. culture and tends to handle badly the ebb and flow of physical intimacy among co-residents and their guests, not only through the excuse of jealousy as a conduit for physical and emotional abuse, but also by applying the playground puritanical ‘cooties’ logic to (almost exclusively) women who have been ‘contaminated’ for future relations by a prior partner within the community. Not that communes uniformly handle this any better — jealousy and power plays can still tear up an open-partners community! — but as all constant human coexistence groupings such as work, school, and churches demonstrate: where people are around each other often, intimacy and its successor attractions will crop up without regard for monogamous fidelity. So, given the U.S. puritanical tendencies, it makes sense that they avoid coresidency: isolating humans inhibits (somewhat) intimacy outside of the married partner.
Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
11–20 of 83 posts
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#12[flagged]
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#13Because hell is other people.
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#14> And yet very few people raise their kids in community. In the US, 71% of children grow up in single family homes. This is the fundamental misconception of the article. Living with your own family does not equate to being raised outside a community. Church, school, little league, etc. are all community networks that huge swaths of society participate in regularly.
You can have quite a close knit community in single family homes - I've known and been parts of neighborhoods where everyone wandered into everyone's house, but you'd never know that looking at the plats.
Communal areas like a shared kitchen immediately fall to the tragedy of the commons, unless there's a HOA or similar that directly pays someone to maintain it.
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#15I love my own children but very much don't enjoy other people's children. I'm sure it's my deficiency but I'd probably murder someone in a community house.
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#16[flagged]
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#17[deleted]
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#18My parents had to share a house with a couple when I was a small child. It was not ideal. Shared kitchen. Other shared spaces. Unless you are all on the same page about things, you are basically taking on extra parents. Other people telling you how to do such and such in raising your child which may be ideas that you're not on par with. When you have your own home, you can amicably disagree and go to the privacy of y…
My company has a cabin us employees can use. Only thing we have to do is reserve it and clean up before we leave.
Cleanliness has been a huge source of frustration, as you say there's a huge chasm between what some people considers "clean enough".
And that's not sharing it at the same time, like in a community home...
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#19My parents had to share a house with a couple when I was a small child. It was not ideal. Shared kitchen. Other shared spaces. Unless you are all on the same page about things, you are basically taking on extra parents. Other people telling you how to do such and such in raising your child which may be ideas that you're not on par with. When you have your own home, you can amicably disagree and go to the privacy of y…
Yup. Disagreements over tidiness, food, kitchen usage, what is appropriate for children, the list goes on and on. Different families come from different cultures, have different values, etc. It's incredibly difficult to find a bunch of other families you're "on the same page with" where you actually want to be co-parenting with and hanging out with all the time. It's one thing when you all grow up together. There's a…
I can't even agree with one spouse about a lot of these things, let alone a bunch of co-parents from different walks of life, in some sort of community house. No way that's going to work. I would not be able to even deal with having my own parents live with us and "help" with our kid. While I love them, the things they consider important about child-raising are not all compatible with the things I consider important and I am certain we would clash all the time.
Re: Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
#20[flagged]
Just one reason is that aging population hurts everyone so it's good to address the root causes of declining birth rates. As an extreme example, a lot of people would try to avoid having a society where 98% of people were older than 85 years.