July 15, 2019

Why camp? I can!

My friend Seth Godin left camp a few days ago. He was here for five wonderful days working with campers and staff. Seth taught canoeing most daytimes, he met with the LITs (Leaders-in-Training), the activity instructors, and lots of lots of folks individually. Why Seth and who is he? As far as I’m concerned, what matters is that Seth was head canoeing instructor at our camp for seven years – before he became a wildly successful marketing guru and thought leader.
As a canoeing teacher, he always said: “I don’t teach the j-stroke. I use the j-stroke as a metaphor for building kids’ character.” That was in the 1980’s.
Fast forward to now.
Seth has less hair now. (To see his pic go to www.sethsblog.com. 299,000 other people go there daily.) This guy, who advises presidents and captains of industry, had one simple message for all of us at camp, campers and staff alike: Show up. Try hard. Do something new and challenging at least once a day. Something you might mess up. It’s ok to fail.
Every day that Seth was here at camp, he and I checked in with each other several times. I gave him a new list of people who could use some special encouragement and a leg up… and groups of staff who could use some inspiration.Seth kept saying that because schools mostly operate on an authoritarian model – because they have to – it puts kids into a mindset of doing only what they have to do. Kids have to go to school, and they have to get good grades in order to make it through the system, so it’s nobody’s fault that schools are authoritarian. But, according to Seth, the results to kid’s psyches are not positive. Too many of them do what they have to do, but do not dare to dream, to challenge themselves, to do really hard things.
I wish I could disagree with him.
I’m in year 31 as a camp director, and I’m hearing “I can’t” so much more often than I did three decades ago. From both campers and staff. Why more now? Partly because of how much schooling has changed in the past 30 years. Back in the day, school was easier. Less intense. Kids weren’t under pressure to do the right extra-curriculars, get super-high grades, compete to get into the right business program at the right university…. Get the right internships to build the right resume… and so on and so on. The pressures to build the right future start earlier and earlier.
The problem is not the pressure but what the pressured school life takes away from children. It fills up kids’ time and attention, their emotional resources, with all those hard things they have to do. Which leaves scant emotional energy for the other hard things they might otherwise choose to take on. There’s a world of difference between challenges we have to take on and those we choose. The difference, a huge one, is that when kids choose a challenge, it gives them the experience of making the hard choice to do something scary or hard. It being their choice matters enormously.
When kids make choices to do hard things, it changes how they see themselves in the world. It increases their sense of agency. They get to practice making hard choices. If you stop and think about what are the crucial life skills, the ability to make hard choices might be near the top of the list: Moral, emotional and physical choices. This comes into play in both personal and professional life. What happens if kids don’t get much practice at it? They get stuck in “I can’t.”
Because practice is the foundation of a great many abilities. Every time I hear “I can’t,” I worry for that person. I worry that they’re not getting enough practice finding their way through challenge to “I can.”
Which is why camp.

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