Children, ageing and the shape of a life

This is the lesson that decides it for a lot of families, and it is the one most often left out — partly because it is unromantic and partly because the honest answers are mixed.

Small children

The practical case is real and it is the thing parents most often report. Someone else is around. A meal you did not cook arrives three times a week. There are adults your child knows well who are not you.

The complications are equally real and less discussed.

Shared childcare is rarely as shared as it sounds. Most communities have no formal childcare at all — what they have is proximity, which turns into help unevenly and usually along familiar lines. Ask whether childcare here is a rota, a favour, or paid work. All three exist and they behave completely differently when someone is tired.

Other people have opinions about your child. In a street this is a raised eyebrow. In a community it is a conversation, possibly a meeting. Communities differ enormously in whether an adult may correct someone else’s child, and the ones that have never discussed it are the ones where it goes wrong.

Children are a workload the community shares unevenly. Households without children often subsidise, through both money and tolerance, things only families use. This is one of the most common quiet resentments in community life, and naming it early is how communities defuse it.

Schooling

Start with the law, because it constrains everything else and people routinely get this backwards.

Home education is lawful in the United Kingdom and in most of the United States. It is illegal in Germany, and has been since 1918 — a ban the European Court of Human Rights upheld unanimously in Wunderlich v. Germany in January 2019, holding that compulsory school attendance pursues legitimate aims including avoiding the emergence of parallel societies, and that removing the children of parents who refused to comply was proportionate. Whatever you think of that, it is the legal reality in a country with a very active community movement.

So the first question about a community’s beautiful plan for its own learning group is not whether it is a good idea. It is what the plan actually is, legally: a registered school, a supplementary group alongside compulsory attendance, or an intention nobody has tested.

Beyond the law, the practical questions are duller and more predictive. How far is the school, and is there a bus? Do the children here go to the same school, or six different ones? A community whose children scatter across half a county shares far less than the brochure implies, because the school run is where family time goes.

Teenagers

Adolescence is the hardest test a community’s culture faces, for a reason that is structural rather than about anybody’s parenting.

A community is a small place where everyone knows you, and the developmental task of being fifteen is to become someone your parents did not design. Those two things are in tension. Teenagers in communities frequently report the same two complaints: that there is nowhere to be unobserved, and that there is nothing to do that was not organised by adults.

Communities that handle it well tend to do three things. They give young people somewhere that is genuinely theirs and not supervised. They give them a real say in decisions from a stated age, rather than a token one. And they accept that some teenagers will want out, and do not treat leaving as a betrayal of the project.

The ones that handle it badly treat adolescence as a failure of the community’s values, which guarantees that the young person’s exit is also a rupture.

What would your household need?

Six questions about who is in your household and what the next decade might hold. There is no score and no result — at the end you get a list of things worth asking a real community, put together from your answers.

1. Are there children in the picture?

Yes, under school age Ask: How many children under five live here now, and how many did five years ago? · Is childcare shared, and if so is it a rota, a favour, or paid? · Where can a child be, unsupervised, that an adult can still see? Yes, of school age Ask: Which schools do the children here go to, and how do they get there? · Has this community ever run its own school or learning group, and what happened to it? · How are disagreements about other people’s children handled? Yes, teenagers or nearly Ask: What do the teenagers here do on a Friday night, and where do they go? · Has a teenager here ever been asked to change their behaviour by someone who is not their parent? How did that go? · Do young people get a say in decisions, and from what age? Possibly, in the next few years Ask: What has happened when a household here has had a baby — did anything change for them practically? · Is there a home here big enough for a growing family, and how would we move into it? No, and not planned Ask: How does the community balance the needs of households with children and those without? · Who pays for things only some households use?

2. How settled are you about schooling?

Ordinary local schools are fine Ask: How far is the nearest school, and is there a bus? · Do most families here use the same school? A community whose children are scattered across six schools shares less than it looks. We want something alternative Ask: Is what you have here a registered school, a supplementary group, or an intention? · Who teaches, are they paid, and what happens if they leave? · What does the law in this country actually require, and who here has checked recently? We are considering home education Ask: Is home education lawful here, and on what conditions? · Does anyone here home-educate now, and would you introduce us to them? Not applicable

3. Is anyone in your household ageing, or caring for someone who is?

We are thinking about our own later years Ask: Who is the oldest person living here, and how long have they been here? · Has anyone grown old and died here? What did the community actually do? · Which homes are step-free, and could one be adapted? We may need to care for a parent Ask: Could a parent of mine live here, and on what basis — as a member, a guest, or not at all? · Is there a guest room or an annexe, and how is it allocated? · What has the community done when a member needed to be away caring for someone? Both, honestly Ask: What is the community’s position on care — what would you do, and what would you not do? · Has anyone here had to leave because their needs outgrew what the place could offer? Not yet Ask: What is the age spread here? A community with everyone within ten years of each other will meet this all at once.

4. Where does your income come from?

Jobs outside the community Ask: How do people get to work from here, and how long does it take? · Is the internet good enough to work from home, and who pays for it? We hope to work here or nearby Ask: Which people here earn their living on site, and doing what? · What does the community charge for use of its space or land for a business? Pension or savings Ask: What have the monthly charges done over the last ten years? · What happens to a member whose income falls below the charges? Uncertain or changing Ask: Is there any hardship provision, and who decides on it? · Has anyone been carried financially, and for how long?

5. How long do you imagine staying?

The rest of our lives, if it works Ask: What happens to my home when I die, and who decides? · Can a member of my family who is not part of the community inherit it? Ten years or so, then we will see Ask: How long does it take to sell or hand back a home here, in practice? Ask about the last one. · What did the last household who left take with them? We want to try before deciding Ask: Is there a way to live here without buying in — a rental, a long guest stay, an associate membership? · What would we get back if we changed our minds at the provisional stage?

6. Does anyone in your household have a support need the community should know about?

Mobility or access Ask: Which parts of this site can a wheelchair reach, including the common house and the meeting room? · Has anyone here needed the buildings changed, and what happened? Mental health Ask: What has the community done when a member was unwell for a long stretch? · Is there any expectation that members support each other through a crisis, and is it written down? Neurodivergence, or sensitivity to noise and crowding Ask: How loud is it here in the evening, and where is the quietest home? · Is attendance at meals and meetings genuinely optional, or optional in theory? · How are meetings run — is there a way to contribute in writing rather than out loud? Not that we know of Ask: How would this place cope if one of us became unable to do our share for a year? Yes, but we would rather not say here Ask: What does the community need to know about a member, and what is nobody’s business? · Who holds personal information about members, and where is it written down?

Growing old

Here the field makes a claim it is usually careful about and occasionally is not.

Senior cohousing is designed around independent living with mutual support — private homes, shared meals, neighbours who notice. Charles Durrett, the architect who brought the model into English, is explicit that it does not replace formal caregiving when it is needed; what it supplies is a layer of informal help underneath the formal system, not instead of it. The practices that go with it have a name — co-care — and the distinction from care is the entire point.

That distinction matters because the failure mode is predictable. A group of friends in their sixties buys a site together. Twenty years later one of them needs two people to help her out of bed at three in the morning, and the community discovers that willingness is not the same as capacity, and that the person doing most of the helping is also seventy-eight.

Communities that avoid this talk about it years before it happens. Durrett’s own formation process for senior groups is a ten-week study course, run before anybody builds anything, in which prospective members work through ageing in place, the economics of later-life housing, and specifically what they will and will not take on for each other. Ten weeks of talking about incontinence and dementia before choosing a site is not most people’s idea of a housing project. It is why some of these communities work.

The physical questions are simpler and worth asking on a first visit. Which homes are step-free? Can one be adapted? Is the common house reachable without stairs, and the meeting room? A community that cannot get a wheelchair to its own governance is going to lose members before it means to.

Death, and the family who are not here

The end of the story is in the documents, and it is worth reading them before you need to.

What happens to your home is decided by which of the four legal shells you are in — freehold passes normally, a co-operative share passes as an asset though your heirs will usually need to be accepted as members to live there, a land trust home can be inherited but the heir takes the resale formula with it, and a tenancy usually ends.

The part nobody plans for is social. Your family may not be part of this community, may not have chosen it, and may arrive grieving into a place with strong opinions about how things are done. Meanwhile the community has lost someone it saw every day and has no standing in the funeral.

Communities that have been through it once tend to write something down afterwards: who is told, who has keys, what happens to the person’s things, whether the community may hold its own gathering, and who talks to the family. Ask whether they have. If somebody has died here, the answer is usually yes and the story is worth hearing.

What to ask on a visit

Sources & further reading

1. 1 Wunderlich v. Germany — European Court of Human Rights, 10 January 2019 — the judgment upholding Germany’s ban on home education, and the reasoning behind it
2. 2 Riazi et al. — Correlates of Children’s Independent Mobility in Canada (2019) — 1,699 children aged 8–12; neighbours looking out for children was not significantly associated with independent mobility
3. 3 The Cohousing Company — Senior Cohousing — co-care versus care, and the ten-week study course senior groups run before building
4. 4 National CoHousing Alliance — Senior Cohousing — communities, events and material on ageing in cohousing
5. 5 Owning, leasing, renting — what your heirs would actually receive, by legal shell

Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written