I just read an essay by a university administrator with tips for preparing kids for college. One strategy jumped out. It is simple and direct and framed almost as an imperative: Send your kids to camp!
If you're trying to prepare young adults for college life, letting them practice independence in weeklong chunks as children would seem like a no-brainer. If the first week of your life you spend out from under your parents' roof is in a college dorm, well, good luck with that.
Earlier this month, our 16-year-old son was away at a Young Life (Christian) retreat in North Carolina - a week he had looked forward to for months. The packing list was a full page long and included specific items like a flannel shirt (for a Western-themed event) throw-away clothes for muddy activities and a unique uniform for a volleyball tournament (his cabin picked medical scrubs and surgical face masks).
While he was away in North Carolina, his mom and I scoured the daily videos posted to the camp's website. We found him in one, during a circle-the-bat race. In the two-second clip, he lost his balance, staggered and then face-planted in the dirt. I put it on slo-mo and watched it again and again. Funny stuff.
But fun is just the veneer for the more important learning that goes on at camp. It's the late-night discussions between kids of different backgrounds that will resonate long after the belly-flop contests and cabin-on-cabin pillow fights are forgotten.
That's what college is like: Meeting and befriending people who are not like you. It can also be a scary place, and camp helps you practice confronting anxiety.
Our 11-year-old son spent last week at Adventure Camp at Reflection Riding Arboretum and Nature Center. The Day 1 activity on Monday was a cave exploration at Raccoon Mountain. Coincidentally, this came after two weeks of genuine anxiety over the extraction of the soccer boys from that cave in Thailand.
Every day during the rescue, our 11-year-old would ask me how many got out. It was heavy on his mind. We talked about what it must feel like to be stuck in a cave. Our son admitted that he was a little uneasy about going caving on Monday, but he stuffed his backpack full of extra snacks and kept a stiff upper lip.
He returned home Monday afternoon with his mud-caked clothes in a plastic bag telling stories about crawling through tiny openings. He has decided he wants to be a spelunker. Overcoming his fear by confronting and conquering caving was a priceless experience.
I was a late bloomer, attending my first sleep-away camp at 13. It was a Christian camp at Fall Creek Falls State Park, and I still remember making the camp's softball all-star team and catching a foul ball that had drifted near the stands.
A couple of years later, I attended a band camp where I attended master classes from a former national-champion drummer. It was a turning point in my development as a music student, which led to a college scholarship a couple of years later.
In college, I worked at several sleep-away band camps and saw kids from small towns blossom musically and socially. For many of them, something as simple as ordering Domino's pizza for delivery was a delight.
So, please, please, send your kids to camp. Save through the year if you must. Look for scholarships if that's the only way.
As a friend once told me: Give them wings and roots.
Roots take care of themselves; wings sometimes require a push.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.