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An essay by Michael Thompson, Ph.D., co-author of
The NY Times bestseller, Raising Cain
 I
went to Vermont for a week this summer and re-discovered a fantastic
lost world of family traditions. A world where people sit down and
eat three meals together every day, serving their food from platters
and talking with one another throughout the meal. A world where
ten-year-olds set the table for dinner and take all the dishes back
to the kitchen when the meal is finished, without complaint. A world
where thirteen-year-old boys don't play video games every night,
nor do they watch TV or sit in front of computers. Instead, they
lie on their beds and read comic books and graphic novels, sometimes
even grown-up novels. In this world, I saw eleven-year-old girls
walking together and holding hands as they walked back to their
cabins. Right out in the open. No girls there send mean instant
messages to one another; they don't I.M. at all. Instead, they sing.
When they are making their beds (yes, they make their beds every
morning) and sweeping out their rooms, they sing together. First
one starts to sing a song, and then the others join in, spontaneously.
There is no adult leading them.
As amazing as these phenomena are, they aren't the most fantastic
things that I witnessed in Vermont. I saw a world where nineteen
and twenty-year-old young men spend hours of time swimming and diving
and kayaking with eleven-year-old boys, and they all seem to enjoy
it equally. When the swimming is over, the boys hang out with the
young men and ask them questions. They also walked to dinner together,
sometimes with the smaller boys hugging and hanging on the bigger
boys, who don't tease them or act annoyed. Even more amazing, at
the end of each evening, the young men, the twenty-year-olds, sit
with older men in their fifties and sixties and listen to them tell
stories about their lives. The young ones aren't sarcastic or dismissive
the way that television sitcoms suggest they are supposed to be.
They seem eager to learn from their elders, night after night. And
at the end of the night, they all sing, boys and young men and old
men, all together around a campfire.
But of course, this isn't a fantastic lost world. As the reader
has certainly guessed, it is summer camp that I am describing. If
we were lucky enough to go to camp ourselves as children, we know
that these things are a precious part of camp life. However, when
I visited a camp for a week in Vermont, some forty years since I
had last attended one myself, I was struck hard by how rarely I
see children engage in these activities anywhere else: not in schools,
not in neighborhoods, not in families. It made me wonder if summer
camps are one of the last places that kids can learn the so-called
"family values" that hard-pressed families no longer have the time
to teach.
"We send a questionnaire to the parents," the dedicated and very
modern camp director told me. "We know what they're looking for
when they send their children here."
I asked the director what the parents say on the survey.
"Fun and friends," he said, "Overwhelmingly, they send their children
for fun and friends; they mention values third."
Doubtless, fun and friends are an important part of a camp experience.
And though the children I saw were having fun, I didn't think that
fun was at the core of the campers' psychological experience. From
my viewpoint, three elements dominated the campers' days. They were
living in a multigenerational community, they were following hallowed
rituals that were universally respected, and they had a lot of downtime.
The rituals started early, with reveille, morning formation, the
raising of the flag, and tent inspection. Ritual surrounded every
aspect of meal time, from the pre-breakfast song to the post-dinner
sing. And everyone, no matter what their age, participated in and
respected the camp traditions. The day ended with taps and a lullaby.
That's right, a lullaby. At 9:30 p.m., I joined a group of men standing
in the dark singing a version of the Brahms lullaby with camp lyrics
to a circle of tents in the woods. The children were asleep by 9:45
and virtually all of them slept solidly until 7:30 when the ritual
clanging of the bell woke them again.
Is there anywhere else in the United States where children, ages
eight to fifteen, have a lullaby sung to them every night? Is there
anywhere where fourteen-year-olds reliably get ten hours of sleep
at night? Despite what the survey revealed, I don't think that families
send their children to camp just for fun. They are sending them
away to get something more fundamental. It may be too painful for
parents to confess that they send their children away to have some
family life that they cannot provide at home.
After all, there can't be too many family dinners when you are
driving your children to the 90-game ice hockey schedule which is
required of thirteen-year-olds on the select ice hockey teams of
North Andover, Massachusetts. You can't have much of an evening
ritual when children are watching TV or are on the computer up until
the last minute before bedtime. And there isn't much downtime in
a family where all the children are in music lessons, tutoring,
martial arts, town sports, SAT prep courses, etc., etc. The only
place a child from a high-pressure family can enjoy some peace and
quiet, and perhaps a good night's sleep (with a lullaby) is away
from home . . . . at camp.
Children don't develop because they are pushed and prodded and
pressured to develop. Children don't develop because of town teams
or because their parents prepare them to go to a "good" college.
Growing up is what kids do, because development is their biological
and psychological imperative. It is the job of adults to create
environments where they have the time and freedom and safety to
grow up at their own pace.
In Vermont I was struck by the fact that a summer camp seems to
provide something that is in short supply in our fast-paced worlds:
respect for ritual, time for the generations to get to know one
another, and of course, the opportunity to take a nap or read a
comic book after lunch every day. A number of the counselors at
the camp, young men and women in their twenties, told me, "I missed
the years when I wasn't at this camp. That's why I came back to
work here." Others simply said, "I love this camp." One young man,
the graduate of a prestigious university and the product of phenomenally
successful parents from New York, stood up on the opening night
of camp and told his fellow counselors, "This camp is my home."
I hope that camps will be able to maintain their traditions in
the face of the frantic, competitive zeitgeist of modern America.
I'm suddenly worried that they will all become specialized (and
driven) learning camps, teaching Division 1 sports skills or computer
skills. I hope not. I am planning to go back next summer and do
some singing. I don't seem to have the time for it around my own
house.
Michael Thompson, Ph.D, is a psychologist and the
author of The Pressured Child: Helping Your Child to Achieve
Success in School and in Life. (Ballantine Books, August, 2004)
and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Raising
Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. (Ballantine, 1999)
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