You know the news business has hit the summer doldrums when The New York Times opinion pages feature a debate on the topic, “Should Kids Go to Sleepover Camp?” (1)
Of course they should. The Sleepaway Campground is a development must. Not for children; they’ll turn out fine no matter what we do to them, within reason. But if you want to raise healthy and well-adjusted parents, you have to send the kids to camp.
I know, because I was a backslidden father before my children’s camp straightened me out.
Like other baby boomers, I grew up in the permissive ’60s and ’70s. We were an anything-goes crowd, not good at setting boundaries. That’s probably why I took my 3-year-old daughter to see “The Little Mermaid” seven times when she was in theaters. Who wanted to wait until it came out on VHS tape?
My wife and I did everything with our children. Take them to beaches from Florida to New England. She dragged them through Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge Village. I visited all the children’s museums and hands-on science centers east of the Alleghenies. Baked potato pancakes with their infant classes. It did not escape us. We were Kardashians before the Kardashians were invented.
Children need stability and order. They need adults who set limits and say mature things like “you can’t do that.” All around us, you never knew what was going to happen next. When our oldest daughter was a little girl, she once fell asleep on the 30-minute drive home from her grandparents’ house in Queens. When she woke up, she was three hours away in Lake George, New York, because her parents had spontaneously decided to get away for the weekend.
After a decade of this suffocation, our oldest son was desperate to escape. We planned for her to go to a week-long overnight camp run by Girl Scouts about an hour from our house. But then I found out that my son would not be allowed to call home or communicate with us for the entire week.
What if she wasn’t happy? Suppose someone said something unpleasant to her or she didn’t like the food. What if she cried for her father and her father didn’t answer?
I really had no idea what to expect if my son went to camp. I never went to camp myself. I spent my childhood summers in bungalow colonies in the Catskills, where the mothers stayed with the children all week while the fathers stayed “in town” to work. The dads only showed up on the weekends, roasting hotdogs and toasting marshmallows for us kids, before disappearing with our moms into a building called “the casino.” There was no gambling in the casino. It was a room where our parents ate disgusting smoked foods like smoked salmon and white fish, laughed at comedians who told jokes that were too bawdy for us kids, and danced to old music we kids definitely didn’t want to hear.
All I knew about sleepover camps was what I learned from Allan Sherman’s 1963 hit song, “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.” (2) It was a ballad of truth and justice, a heroic story of deprivation and survival, until the last part where the evil people of the camp forced him to say that everything was fine.
So, ashamed as I am to say it now, I terribly overreacted to the news that the Girl Scouts of America intended to hold my daughter incommunicado. I forbade her to leave her. Really. My wife tried unsuccessfully to reason with me. Instead of sending the oldest to sleep camp and keeping the youngest at day camp, we took the kids to Walt Disney World for probably the 100th time.
However, children and mothers are resistant. The following year they did it again. They consulted a Camp Lady, whose job it was to match parents with suitable camps that their children wouldn’t mind attending. Camp Lady recommended the Sports and Arts Center on Island Lake in Starrucca, Pennsylvania, a beautiful co-ed facility patiently and lovingly run by a New York-area family, the Stoltzes. I was still undecided about this, until one afternoon my daughter’s friend, Julie, stopped by. She looked at the Island Lake brochure on the counter and commented that she was going there too, because her mother would be the camp nurse.
That settled the matter.
My daughter made the most of her opportunity. She began attending Island Lake at age 11 and returned every summer until she was 25. She was a former camper, counselor-in-training, counselor, group leader, and program director. She became close to the Stoltz family, and they treated my daughter, and her little sister, who began attending the following year, as if they were their own.
My kids were great campers. I was a nightmare of a parent camp. When the bus came to pick them up at the Cross County Mall in Yonkers, I misbehaved: I got on the bus until the little guy ran after me and I danced across the parking lot, twisting the lyrics to a song from the Disney movie.” The Lion King,” while yelling, “No kids! No kids! Tra-la-la-la-la-la!” My daughters became adept at pretending I was a bum just passing through, but after five or six years of this, their camp friends, and there were a lot of them, probably figured it out.
There was still the matter of limited contact. Island Lake divides the summer into three sessions, and families can send their children to any or all of them. This flexibility came in handy when my kids grew up and wanted to do other things while spending part of the summer at Island Lake. But each session provided only one phone call opportunity, and there is only one visitation day each summer (two for children whose parents are separated). On visiting day we would take the kids out for lunch and shopping, and we were always the last to return them at the end of the day.
Island Lake finally trained me to separate from my children. When they went off to college, each in a city nearly 1,000 miles apart, distance didn’t seem important. We could call and text whenever we wanted, and they came to the house as often as I sent them tickets.
Sending kids to camp teaches parents that we can function independently.
My daughters are now adults and are working hard to build their own lives. Last night my wife and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. We are on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, visiting the beaches and sleeping within earshot of the waves.
It’s like a sleepover camp for empty nesters. And yes, it is good for us.
Sources:
1) The New York Times, “Should Kids Go to Sleepover Camp?”
2) YouTube, “Allan Sherman – Hello Muddah Hello Faddah (1963)”