Summer, Camps, and Childhood

Not long ago, someone on 𝕏 asked where the trend of kids attending back-to-back summer camps came from. He recalled a time—one many of us remember—when camp was a one-week event, or skipped entirely. Now it seems, according to the tweeter, that kids are booked from the end of school until its resumption (which in many places creeps ever earlier) with camps of one kind or another. Today, it seems the summer calendar is as booked for children as it is for corporate executives.

The question behind the tweet was either genuine curiosity or a subtle rebuke of modern parenting. But let’s take it seriously. Why has this become the norm?

What is behind this phenomenon? I’d suggest two things: scheduling and an exaggerated notion of “parenting.”

Scheduling

Two working parents are today’s sociological norm. Some might not like that, but it is a fact. With both parents out of the house for much of the day, camp becomes summer daycare. With irregular work hours, overnight camp addresses the issue of “on-time” child pickup versus aggressive late “penalties.”

There’s a certain incredulity on social media when folks of my generation comment that our parents often told us, “Be good and be home before dark.” That worked in neighborhoods where there were other kids at one of whose houses we usually hung out. With our fertility implosion, child-rich neighborhoods are few and far between. With an intrusive state, one can imagine jurisdictions where child protective services might consider affording children such free range would be regarded as “child neglect.”

The work problem has sometimes led to the proposal of eliminating summer recess. The argument is that the American school calendar was shaped by parental agricultural needs in the summertime. Since those needs no longer exist, neither should summer recess. Let’s stagger the schedule across 12 months.

I have problems with that idea, and not just out of tradition. First, extended exposure to school systems—particularly the monopoly public school plantation—seems hardly in children’s best interests. Second, a staggered system just reshuffles time off: find a winter camp in January instead of a summer camp in July. Third—but most important—is the value of “time off” and “play.” More about that later on.

Parenting 

Another factor fueling summer camp proliferation is a particular model of “parenting” that has descended from parts of the American upper middle classes to be regarded as a “norm” for all parents. It envisions the parent as having to provide broad and varied “enrichment activities” by which a child might “discover” his talents, abilities, and interests. Obviously, such a “balanced” set of “enrichment” might include archery camp followed by math camp, cooking camp, and drama camp.

The subtitle of Tim Carney’s book Family Unfriendly captures the problem: “How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.” Among the factors he lists are this very time-and especially resource-intensive model of parenting. Let’s be honest: How does a single parent making $15/hour keep up with such demands? Do children really need such variegated “experiences” to “discover themselves?”  

Isn’t it also interesting that one of the “discovery” rites of passage of my generation—a summer job—seems to have gone into eclipse?

The Problem of Play

An unspoken part of the summer dilemma seems to be the “problem of play.” Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw, in their various writings about the basic human goods, list “play” (something done for its own sake and enjoyment) as a basic human good. As there are at least seven to eight basic human goods, each perfects the human person in ways others cannot.

There is a value in basic, free, unstructured play—that is, in letting kids use their imagination and their (usually limited) resources. It’s something that has been lost by the rise of “helicopter parenting”—the ubiquitous presence of parents on playgrounds hovering around lest their child “cast his foot against a stone.” I’ve often argued this phenomenon inhibits real play: it’s not so much kids play with each other as they happen to “play” like monads simultaneously in that space.  

Free play without schedules develops imagination and eliminates the dictatorship of the watch (both parental and timepiece). Kids will have more than ample encounters with watches (supervisorial and chronological) later in life: it’s more important now that they develop the creativity imagination affords.  

“Leisure” as Josef Pieper’s basis for culture does not appear in one’s 40s, after having read a sufficient number of “great books” and learned to smoke a pipe. Leisure starts in childhood where a kid has a chance to “think about things.” That’s not time wasted; it’s time well spent.

In conclusion, why have we seen the summer camp proliferation phenomenon? Part of it is our economic choices as a society. Making two-income wage earners the norm requires warehousing kids. Part of it is our cultural choices. Maximum and “non-directive choices” for “self-discovery” are increasingly called “good” (if expensive) parenting. And our mania about “raise-for-success” (seen primarily economically, as we can observe with the collapse of family formation) depreciates the value of play, which means it depreciates the value of childhood.  

The problem with our society is that instead of looking holistically at how we’ve gotten ourselves to the place we’re in, we pick the elements we don’t like and run with them. At least when it comes to our kids’ welfare, might we perhaps step out of that narrow mindset?