Camp Teaches Resilience
Everyone experiences setbacks now and then, the occasional failed effort or unexpected misfortune. But what happens when you kids trip up or get knocked down? Do they stay down? Sink lower, and let that moment of failure defeat them? Or, do they bounce back, maybe learn from the experience, and gain a new dimension of confidence to face the next challenge? Put differently, how resilient are your kids?
Dr. Michael Ungar, a Social Worker, Family Therapist, and University Research Professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada has thought about this question a lot. He is a co-director of the Resilience Research Centre, an organization coordinating experts from around the world in sociology, psychiatry, education and medicine in a broad project to understand the cross-cultural similarities and differences in how resilience is understood, and to explore ways we can help children and young people be more resilient.
Several times before we’ve discussed how summer camp helps kids grow and how becoming more resilient is one of the clear benefits of camp. Now Dr. Ungar weighs in with a nice Psychology Today article entitled, “Summer Camps Make Kids Resilient.”
I encourage you to go read the article, but I wanted to summarize his main points here as well. Perhaps most importantly, Ungar identifies summer camp as a place where kids learn to do things for themselves without the kind of careful orchestration parents ordinarily provide. It’s a place where, instead, they can try challenging activities and take manageable risks, all while being provided encouragement and positive role models to help them learn to cope with disappointments.
Speaking from his research on resilience, Ungar pinpoints 7 important components of the summer camp experience children need to develop these coping strategies. These are seven things camp provides that help kids when they experience setbacks later in their lives.
- New friendly relationships
- Regular moments of pride and self-confidence
- Experiences of competency and self-efficacy
- Relief from unfair social treatment
- Healthy physical activity and nutrition habits
- Belonging to a meaningful community
- Opportunities to reflect on cultural values
There’s so much more to each of these, and I suspect interesting mechanisms that make them effective. What’s important to realize is that all of them are core ingredients of the camp experience here at Rockbrook. The program activities, staff training, and overall camp philosophy here work together to insure that our campers enjoy these beneficial experiences. Of course, we’re having a really great time together as well, just as we strengthen our powers of resilience.
Researching the Benefits of Camp
“Sending kids to camp allows children to grow and learn good citizenship, social integration, personal development and social development, exploring his or her capabilities and being in a safe environment where they can grow, gain independence and take risks.”—Troy Glover, the director of the University of Waterloo’s Healthy Communities Research Network
It’s pretty easy for those who have attended camp to speak enthusiastically about how much it’s meant to them. Campers themselves are full of glowing stories about their summer camp experiences, but even adult camp alumni, many years later, can trace aspects of their personal success back to their time at camp.
For others, though, how camp provides these important benefits, and what types of benefits to expect from a summer camp experience, are not apparent. It was this fact —the general public’s unawareness of what makes camp great for children— that prompted a team of Canadian researchers to study and evaluate the impact of a camp experience.
Working with camp directors, staff, campers and camp alumni, the researchers conducted surveys and compiled observations focused on what a summer camp provides and how that affects children over their time at camp. Read about the study, its background and findings, on this Web site.
Confident Risk Taking
- Social Capital
- Risk Taking
- Environmental Attitudes
- Physical Activity
- Cultural Capital
There is, of course, quite a bit to explain about each of these areas, so I encourage you to read more about the study’s findings on their site. Also, there is a nice article about the study, complete with great quotes from camp directors, campers and staff members, published in Vaughan Today.
This is exciting stuff! We’ve often discussed the benefits of camp for children, so it’s nice to see this kind of organized, methodical verification. Now spread the word! Let’s help others understand how uniquely “camp is a place for kids to grow.”
Interrupt the Race to Nowhere
After discussing the rigorous, driven parenting style recounted by Amy Chua, the recent documentary film Race to Nowhere adds fuel to the fire. In their desire to do “what’s best” for their kids, to provide them “every opportunity,” and to cheer them on to “work hard” toward their goals, the film shows parents pushing their kids to the brink. It’s heartbreaking to see in the film the anxiety both school kids and their parents are dealing with as they race between school work, team practice, and other responsibilities. The quality of what they eat and the amount of sleep they get are the first to be sacrificed in this pressure to excel, but kids are also, I would say, giving up important parts of their childhood. In the name of “getting into a good college” and later, “getting a good job” they have hopped on a treadmill that’s speeding past valuable opportunities to develop as healthy, happy human beings.
Here again, we have to applaud the power of a traditional sleepaway summer camp to act as a welcome relief from these pressures. Rockbrook is a down-to-earth community of people who simply love to relax, be themselves, make good solid friendships, and enjoy the pure freedom of summer. We’re a zany bunch, always in motion, and always ready to try something new for the fun of it. Camp, like the best moments of childhood, is full of unexpected pleasures. Surrounded by equally enthusiastic people, it’s easy to be excited about everything!
The lasting benefits of a camp experience are very well documented, but here’s another. It’s simply wonderful for kids to take a break from the pressures of school. Interrupting the “race to nowhere” with camp is a very good idea.
Amy Chua and Summer Camp
Have you run into Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, or heard any of the controversy surrounding it? The book is mostly a memoir of Chua’s own childhood and her Chinese mother’s parenting style, but it’s also an account of how she is raising her own children with similarly strict, high standards, as opposed to what she sees as the overly indulgent, coddling, and soft ways of western parenting. Some of the anecdotes are shocking… demanding thousands of math problems be completed in training for a competition, threatening to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if a music composition wasn’t played flawlessly, and refusing to allow her daughters to attend a sleepovers because they are a waste of time. It’s not too hard to see why American mothers were so quick to denounce the book as horrible parenting advice.
After hearing about this, you have to wonder if Amy Chua ever sent her kids to summer camp. I kind of doubt it. We can only speculate, but for parents that value intellectual, musical or athletic achievement over everything else, spending weeks at summer camp to “just play” doesn’t make much sense. Calls for a longer school year, and thereby a greater opportunity for classroom learning, are akin to this attitude. The idea is that if you really want to be good at something, even the best at it, then you have to give up other things. Superior achievement requires sacrifice! While it is true, this approach can yield highly trained, skilled people, you have to wonder “at what cost?” Sure you might be a top-notch pianist, but what did you miss out on when you were doing all that practicing? Yes, we can all be a lot better at math and science if we study all year round and you might even be a world-class athlete, but with all that training, do you have any time for other parts of yourself? Your creativity, your friends, your undiscovered talents? Sadly, the answer in most of these cases is “no.”
Amy Chua’s book reminds us that training our kids too rigorously, at the expense of the “whole child,” can have serious consequences. Like a blind devotion to academic achievement, we risk narrowing educational experience and perspective to the point of debility.
Fortunately (and I would include Chua here), most parents understand the value of providing their children diverse educational opportunities because they want them to grow up with a wide range of personal skills that can serve them later in life.
That’s why parents send their children to Rockbrook. They want more for their girls than just what school provides. They understand the tremendous benefits of a summer camp experience. They know camp is fun, but more importantly, is a break from all the “practices” of the school year, where girls can relax and explore all the other sides of who they are.
Media Use Among Children
About a year ago, the Kaiser Family Foundation published the results of an extensive study examining the amount of time children (ages 8-18) spend consuming different forms of media for recreation: TV, movies, Internet sites, video games and mobile devices (ipods, tablets, and smart phones). They conducted the study by surveying children in 2009, following similar efforts in 1999 and 2004. The goal was to quantify average media use and show trends over time.
The trends really aren’t too surprising, but the quantities have to make you pause. Overall, daily media use among children and teens is up dramatically from 5 years ago. This follows from an increase in the availability of recreational technology (in particular mobile devices— no longer must we be at home or plugged into a wall to consume electronic entertainment), but also from a tendency to allow children unrestricted access to television, video games and computers. Interestingly, the study does not count text messaging or using a cellphone for a telephone call. So what are the totals? Here’s a summary of the findings:
- 7 hours, 38 minutes of media comsumption per day (53 hours per week)
- 64% say the TV is on during meals
- cellphone ownership has grown from 39% to 66%
- Black and Hispanic children consume nearly 4.5 more hours of media per day
- 75% of 7th-12th graders have a social networking profile
The study makes no conclusions beyond reporting these averages. It does not suggest, for example, a cause and effect connection between high media use and poor grades in school (though it does show that correlation). Essentially, whatever the consequences of electronic media/entertainment use, we have confirmation here that they are increasing.
There is, however, another conclusion we can’t ignore. As children spend more of their free time consuming electronic media, they are certainly spending less time doing other things, perhaps valuable things. Just think of what else our kids could be doing during those 53 hours each week! They could be playing outside (our favorite!), forming new friendships, developing their creative powers, or being physically active. And this is just scratching the surface. There’s no doubting the allure of technology and its power to push aside other beneficial, more human, activity. With this study, we have evidence that for our children, more and more is being pushed aside.
Camp, as we’ve mentioned before, is a place where we intentionally turn off our electronics. We reclaim those 53 hours! And spend our time actually doing things: arts and crafts, sports, horseback riding, outdoor adventure, singing, dressing up, and pretty much playing around all day long. Far beyond what electronic entertainment media provides, spending a few weeks at a summer camp like Rockbrook is a wonderful opportunity for children to exercise so much more of who they are. Camp reminds them that “life is much more fun in the real world.”
Holiday Wishes from RBC
Even though Clement Clarke Moore wrote the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (or “The Night Before Christmas”) back in 1822, its imagery and lyrical phrases still inspire us today. Here are a few illustrations taken from several early editions of the poem. Nancy Carrier, the founder of Rockbrook, was born in 1889, so these are the editions she would have read as a little girl!
As we settle down for our “long winter’s nap” and reflect upon the past year, all of us at Rockbrook want to wish everyone a wonderful holiday season. Cheers!
 |  |
 |  |
A Teacher in Everything
October 14, 2010 by Jeff
Filed under summer camp
For quite some time now, we’ve talked about summer camp providing children valuable lessons, unique opportunities to learn that can’t be recreated in traditional educational contexts. If you mention this claim to just about anyone associated with a summer camp, you’ll find full agreement. Summer camps are “Youth Development” organizations. Camps are heaps of fun, but are also something kids need to foster their growing up.
The American Camp Association has articulated these educational benefits of camp most extensively. Following broad research initiatives and years of collecting data from summer camps across the country, the ACA continually makes a strong case for what children gain from a camp experience. The list of these “outcomes” and “competencies” is now well-known: self-identity, self-worth, self-esteem, leadership, self-respect, compassion, contribution, commitment, caring, honesty, generosity, sharing, resilience, resourcefulness, ethical awareness, responsibility, and communication skills. We have discussed many of these benefits on this blog, here, here and here for example.
The next question to ask, however, is not “what gains do children make at camp,” but “how does camp provide these benefits?” There is a lot to this, of course, but let me point out one crucial reason summer camp has this unique educational power, and again, power above and beyond what traditional classroom educational settings offer.
Residential summer camps are uniquely educational because they are first and foremost communities dedicated, through first-hand experiences, to broad personal, social and physical well being. Camps are experiential learning communities. Led by admirable, caring adult role models, summer camp communities are tightly-knit groups of people who not only live (eat, play, make) together, but also grow personally by virtue of experiencing so much together. So many of the “outcomes” and “competencies” above, those personal qualities we all recognize as valuable— honesty, compassion, responsibility, generosity, etc., can be traced to what individuals gain from fully participating in a vibrant positive community. Summer camp communities are dedicated to, thrive upon, and thus foster, these kinds of personal traits.
Equally important is the full-time nature of the summer camp community experience. These aren’t lessons taught sitting at a desk in idealized abstract language. This is learning that’s lived. At camp, the “teachable moments” actually happen, involve real people, and carry real personal consequences. Just about every moment at camp is this kind of “teachable moment,” an opportunity to learn from the interaction with others and the natural world. At summer camp, there is a teacher in everything!
Being at summer camp is almost non-stop fun, but it also brings out the best in kids by asking them to pay attention to the people around them, and to build positive relationships of all kinds. It’s this kind of direct experiential community learning that gives camp the power to shape young people so profoundly.
How Did We Come to Meet Pal?
Camp provides a huge range of opportunities for girls, chances to try new sports, acquire new skills, discover untapped talents, and of course meet and live with new people. There are wide stripes of fun woven throughout all of this, but the most significant things campers talk about is the amazing friendships they build while at camp. Living so closely together, and sharing so much time together, camp is perfect for making friends. It’s easy at camp to relax and be yourself, open up a little and trust each other. That’s probably why there’s something special about camp friends, why for lots of girls, they are their very best friends.
One of the traditional songs at Rockbrook is about camp friends, about the experience of making friends at camp. It’s called How Did We Come to Meet Pal? Here are the lyrics. Read them over, and then go to our camp songs page and listen to the tune!
|
