How camp gives kids a world of good: an interview with Mary Pipher.

Community, is our scarcest commodity in the 1990s, warns Mary Pipher, clinical psychologist, family therapist, and author of Reviving Ophelia, the New York Times bestseller that probes the psychological toll of growing up in today's society with a focus on the complex world of teenage girls. In her subsequent book, The Shelter of Each Other, Pipher explores options for building a sense of community and asks us how we can help children. With a pulse on American families and the struggles that they valiantly wage, Pipher expertly diagnoses that these are times when "parents have no real community to back up the values that they try to teach their children." The media, she sadly explains, defines our community, and the "electronic village is our hometown."

Camp Is an Answer

In an interview with Camping Magazine, Pipher states that camp is an answer. And, if we know what ails children at the portal of the millennium, we can help cure the epidemic. "The best camps are creating the best of what existed in the 1940s - a sense of shared purpose," exclaims Pipher. "Parents are trying harder than parents twenty years ago tried, and yet their children aren't doing as well. . . .Parents seem desperate and lost, and their children are bitter and out of control," she laments.

Enter camp - a community created exclusively for children, where they can cultivate their roots and find their wings. The camp experience helps build values and skills in a supervised, positive environment with controlled boundaries. Experiential education presupposes that all children succeed at their own level. And trained, caring counselors help shape campers' experiences by modeling positive behavior. Camp is about relationships, getting along, belonging, and feeling capable and significant.

The key messages of camp, it turns out, are the very beacons that can help save today's families. If we, as the caretakers of this unique community experience, can embrace the needs of children in this era. then we can also be the vital link to the renewed health our society desperately seeks.

The Camp Connection

Mary Pipher insists that we need "tiospaye," a Sioux word meaning the people with whom one lives. She suggests that people grew up healthy when all adults were responsible for all children. Today's kids have little, if any, relationship with adults other than their parents. "[While] there is an enormous disconnect between generations," she pronounces, "camp reinforces parents' values, because other adults help kids figure out the world." The role of camp becomes pivotal as we enter the next century, because we need more ways to keep people connected.

When we create tiospaye, all members belong to a caring community. "Family is a collection of people who pool resources and help each other over the long haul," Pipher elaborates. Again, she singles out camp as an indispensable opportunity for kids, who are being "raised by appliances," to connect intergenerationally. At camp, everyone knows your name, she muses, underscoring the qualities of responsibility and accountability that children need to have. Independence is fostered as youngsters learn their value to this community. Courage and self-esteem become bywords in a village that protects its inhabitants.

An Adolescent Culture

Since families in America have been invaded by technology, there are no longer walls to protect the children, Pipher explains. In past generations, there was a two-tiered culture where adults filtered information, because they could read and children could not."With [today's] electronic culture, we are deconstructing childhood. Likewise adults are vanishing," Pipher observes. The end product is a nation of adolescents. Children are modeling how to interact from television and are blitzed by an advertising barrage that skews their values. The culture, not the parents, is to blame, she deduces.

Finding Solace at Camp

Camp, which we define as a community built especially for children, is the very experience that can show youngsters two different worlds. While children are trained to respond to advertising and are not naturally socialized, Pipher specifies that camp professionals can teach them an aesthetic pleasure, a solace, an appreciation for the world around them. She quotes Plato, "Education is teaching our children to find pleasure in the right things." She then quickly adds, "That's what camp is."

Emphasizing that kids today need skills, Pipher reflects, "Children don't know how to garden, build a fire, or sew. Camp teaches them how to identify the natural world. We acknowledge what we can name. So, will it be soft drinks or birds?" The crisis of our culture is rooted in our isolation and in the values of a consumption-oriented society.

Pipher espouses, "Good parents used to introduce their children into the broader culture; now they try to protect their children from the broader culture." In a world where it is harder for children to feel safe, competent, and in control, camp is a refuge that emphasizes human well-being and revalues the natural world. It provides a balance and a safety net for the turmoil that envelopes families who are increasingly swallowed up by the message that "products satisfy and happiness can be purchased."

While Pipher cautions that families are in jeopardy, she suggests therapy that is rooted in the outdoors. She recommends that families in trouble plan activities together that revolve around nature. Camp, she concludes, is a natural antidote to society's woes because surviving in today's society depends upon protecting children from what is ugly in our culture and connecting to what is beautiful. Counting sunsets, she proclaims, must take precedence over counting dollars.

Camp Is the Healthy Alternative

According to Pipher, children need interaction with peers, as well as adults. In the arena of camp, they learn to solve problems, to make mistakes, to negotiate conflicts, and to give and get constructive feedback. In the camp setting, adult guidance and monitoring ensure the successful acculturation of these emotional competencies. "Camp is the perfect experience: it provides medium-level structure that has all but disappeared," she exhorts.

In a climate where it is harder to know what we need to survive, we can draw on the camp experience for the child and the youth development assets it naturally promotes. Since camp is a place to practice growing up and success today requires different skills, families have a healthy alternative to therapists or chemicals. The very capabilities that Pipher pinpoints as hallmarks of thriving - coping skills, such as anger control and stress management, and communication skills, such as assertiveness and empathic listening - are the emotional skills we coach at camp.

Some basic truths

As youth development specialists, camp professionals need to stop blaming families and start embracing them. We need to let families know that we are their advocates and allies, that we provide what Bob Ditter metaphorically describes as "an envelope of safety." We need to train our staff to lead children through a land where they can take healthy risks, and we need to uphold the traditions of the community we create. We need to understand that kids want limits and structure, that they seek positive, real role models, and that they crave a place where they can dream and invent their own futures. We need to champion ourselves as their guides and mentors as we cultivate the tiospaye we call camp, reviving the old-fashioned community that used to provide the foundation for healthy families.

Facing the Challenge

Camp helps children find the courage to be themselves, to release their stresses, and to find serenity in the world around them. Camp helps children aspire, affirm, and achieve their futures. Camp is community. And community is the footing that grounds us from the stimuli and shocks of a culture that suggests that the world revolves around each of us.

As child development experts and advocates, we have a lofty challenge. What are the core values we should focus on? How can we further help families and their children? Where does camp fit into the plan for the new millennium? How do we better equip adult leaders?

Indeed, our role on the threshold of the twenty-first century is paramount; we must broadcast to America that every child needs a camp experience! We must articulate and accept the challenge! Mary Pipher supports what camp professionals have always innately known is the most important job in the world - providing and overseeing a community constructed especially for children, where they can feel physically and emotionally safe, have positive role models, take healthy risks, and taste success.

Gather Around

Gather around Mary Pipher's "campfire" at the 1999 ACA National Conference in Chicago. Dr. Pipher will deliver a keynote address on Thursday, March 4, from 8:30 to 10:00 A.M. Hear firsthand from the internationally acclaimed author why camp is a vital part of a child's total education and how we, as its leaders, can facilitate the acquisition of essential life skills.

Bob Ditter will lead a follow-up session for parents and their camp directors from 10:30 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. This session offers a unique forum for parents to respond to issues discussed by Dr. Pipher and connect with camp professionals. Camp directors will be admitted only if with a parent.

Camp directors/owners can request printed invitations to mail to parents by contacting Kathy Henchey at the ACA national office, 765-342-8456, ext. 320, or e-mail [e-mail].

Pipher's Toolbox of Tips

Reviving Ophelia

Mary Pipher, a University of Nebraska professor, has assembled a toolbox of tips to help strengthen intergenerational relationships. Reviving Ophelia, named after Hamlet's tragic heroine, was written as a guide to rescue young women drowning in the culture of the 1990s. Her challenge to contemporary culture is a thoughtful reflection of its effects on her own children, who also were raised in an age plagued by consumerism, TV values, narcissism, and eating disorders.

It is most important, declares Pipher, that children have a place to be children. If courage and self-esteem form the foundation of a child's personality, then camp is the cement that binds them. Shakespeare's Ophelia loses herself in adolescence because she has no inner direction. At camp, children learn to set goals and then affirm action steps to help them reach those objectives. They learn to become possibility thinkers.

While Ophelia drowns in a stream filled with flowers after failing to meet the demands of both Hamlet and her father, campers are buoyed to leave their comfort zones when they feel secure in taking healthy risks. They find their strengths, and they acknowledge areas for growth. They discover self-confidence and self-awareness, which help them navigate to adulthood, rather than sink in despair as the grief-stricken Ophelia does.

The Shelter of Each Other

Pipher calls The Shelter of Each Other a "love song to families." What is significant for us, as camp directors, is that we can help remedy the lack of community that is disorienting families. By understanding that community is people with whom we share our stories, we can resurrect what we had in the 1940s and 1950s. By empowering staff to become good listeners, inspiring guides, and passionate coaches, we can regenerate a sense of community where adults care about children. We can provide the personal relationships that today's children covet-the social glue they need to flourish in a world where they are constantly besieged by advertising nuances and attacks.

Reviving Ophelia and The Shelter of Each Other can be purchased at the ACA National Conference in Chicago. Pipher's new book, Another Country: The Emotional Terrain of Our Elders, will be released March 15, 1999.

Marla Coleman is owner/director of Coleman Country Day Camp in Merrick, New York. She is a member of the ACA Public Awareness Committee.