When I tell people I spend my summers working at summer camps their reactions are fairly predictable. If they’ve never been to camp, they don’t get it. Why would anyone send their kids away for the summer? For them, it’s a childcare option and not much more.
But for those who have been to camp themselves there’s a lot of excitement. They are immediately envious that I get to go ‘play’ at camp. They regale me with stories of their own camping days and then end off as they started – with a sense of envy about my summers spent canoeing, kayaking, windsurfing, hanging out at Arts and Crafts, going on the zip line and chilling out in my cabin during rest hour. Or so they think!
Spoiler alert… I’m about to bust some of those myths about how I spend my time at camp and encourage you to look at camps a little bit differently, whether you’ve been to one or not.
Camp is definitely a place where a lot of fun happens. But as one great camp director always says ‘fun is not the goal of summer camp. Fun is what happens on our way to achieving our goals.’ And this goal is nothing short of growing children and young adults in the most important sense of what it means to grow people.
Every good camp director will say the same thing: camp is a place where everyone gets to learn about who they are and is challenged to become the best version of themselves. And parents agree. After a few weeks at camp, they find themselves the recipients of children who are much more confident, independent and thoughtful. They see more growth and maturity in their children after time spent at a summer camp than they’ve seen the entire year leading up to it.
So for many parents camp is not only not simply a childcare option to get rid of their kids for the summer, it is one of the best things they can do for them. Even during the lean years of the past decade parents have given up family vacations, used savings or money typically allocated for savings contributions, or have even involved other family members to ensure that their own financial challenges did not disrupt the incredible learning and growing experiences from which their children benefit at camp. They might not always understand how camps do what they do but they know they’re good at it and their children thrive while away.
And now back to me. Why do I go to camp and what do I do there? The learning and growing through the supportive and challenging environment at camp is not restricted to a ‘camper-zone’. Rather the desire to focus on and draw out the best in everyone is equally felt by anyone passing through the camp gates. So I too get to learn and grow from each experience.
I spend my time at camp meeting with staff, discussing complicated behaviours or interactions involving campers and/or other staff. I also get to be involved in some of the big picture discussions about the camp’s culture, identity and what kind of place it wants to be for those who come. It’s often non-stop work from morning to night so although I hate to disappoint those who believe I spend my summers playing at camp, I have to tell you that in the last two years of visiting camps, I have only been in a canoe three times for about a half-hour each and swam once. There simply wasn’t any time for that. This fact demonstrates that although fun is happening all around the staff at summer camp and that they do often get to partake in it at times, they are very dedicated to improvement and take advantage of my outsider’s perspectives to help make their camp the best it can be, even when it comes at the expense of some of that fun.
I have learned a lot from the staffs’ dedication, passion, and commitment in the past four years. In many ways I feel like all I’ve learned – or have been reminded of – at summer camps is pretty close to everything I need to know to live an incredibly rich life.
Here are a few highlights:
- Ask questions. Of yourself. Of others. Sometimes things look obvious but there’s often much more happening beneath the surface.
- Understand that if you want success for yourself or for others you need to know what it looks like and that it’s often different for each person.
- Know that there are usually different paths that will lead to the same place. Once you know where it is you or someone else wants to go your job isn’t to figure out the BEST path to get there but the RIGHT path for person traveling it.
- Success motivates more success. We often want more for ourselves or others than is required to be successful in the moment and that’s okay for the most part. But not okay if we do it at the expense of celebrating the incremental successes necessary along the way to greater achievements.
- Raise the bar higher. People feel their most driven when someone believes that they can do more than they thought was possible. They also feel their most proud when they reach that bar.
Summer camp is a powerful place where lots of learning and growing happens. It’s sometimes hard to replicate this type of environment elsewhere in our lives but it’s relatively simple to look back on what we learned at camp and to use that knowledge or skill elsewhere. To that end, I’d love to hear your own stories from camp – especially those that demonstrate what you’ve learned and how this has helped you in life. So please take a minute and post some of summer camp thoughts and stories here as I think we can all benefit from a little more camp in our lives!
Looking forward to reading your stories.
Scott
