Pushing the drug, embracing the withdrawal: Is this really the cure to children’s unhappiness?

In her article “There’s No Cure for the Campsick Child (and That’s OK)” Sandra Fox asks a big question: What is the solution to the problem of sleepover camp withdrawal; that feeling many kids have when they return from an adventure filled, super intense, friendship building, group bonding summer, sink down into deep sadness at the prospect of returning to their ‘normal’ dull lives and school routines, passing time till they can return next summer to something that resembles joy.

The solution offered by the author…

“If your kids come home campsick, don’t worry about curing them. Let them know that camp was always meant to provide a bubble away from reality that’s intense and ephemeral by design. They can’t bring it home with them, nor should they want to. You can remind them, though, once they’re back in the real world, that opening day is only 10 short months away.”

I found myself speechless when reading this paragraph. I appreciate how powerful the author felt about camp, and I know her experience faithfully mirrors similar ones so many children have each summer (I had it myself as a young person). But is her conclusion – that we casually embrace the idea that childhood joy happens in rare liminal experiences, and train our children to patiently spend ¾ of their lives waiting for the return of the ¼ – an answer or an abdication?

What if Camp Was Daily Life?

How about turning this around and seeing if we can make the lives of children more like camp, all year round. That’s what unschooling and self-directed education (SDE) is all about. 

I don’t mean that we should create the kind of super organized camp experience where each hour is accounted for and most of the play is supervised by adults; or try and artificially induce camp-like experiences at home. I mean that we can strive to allow young people to experience adventure, fun, joy, risk, excitement and meaningful, collaborative engagements as a way of life. 

If this sounds silly or unrealistic, it is. But only if our mindset remains fixed in the idea that in order to survive and thrive children must spend their whole childhood in an institution or set of institutions that determine how they learn, what they learn, when they learn, with whom they learn: and that they should have no right to self-determination in their learning paths.

(To find out more about the work and ideas of the amazing practitioners designing liberated learning spaces where children can experience self-directed education (SDE) and more autonomy – in schools, outside schools, in community spaces – see The Great Family Tree).

What are the consequences of telling children it’s ok for their “ordinary” lives to be boring?

As I read Fox’s article I wondered, what would be the value of spreading the message of the piece? How might children (or parents) be impacted by internalizing that message? 

Why tell young people to find ways to kill ¾ of their childhood – time that is unique, that they will never get back, that is formative to their future well-being – waiting for the return of the magical ¼; and then tell them that this sacrifice of childhood is normal and inevitable? 

Why not instead begin a dialogue on how to recalibrate the balance in a child’s life between the ¾ and the ¼?

Why blithely accept that children should consider their fun as something temporally and physically separate from their daily lives, or that being happy, excited, stimulated is a ‘bubble’ separated from ‘reality’, as if to engrain in them the idea that exciting and joyful experiences must be rare? 

Why not instead explore what kinds of activities and interests they could pursue in their “real” worlds that will truly inspire them? Why not open up the discussion about how play is not something to be reserved for camp and weekends but has been shown to be necessary for the mental health, socialization and learning of young people. Why not discuss what has been lost to children who live in a risk-free world where there are not given the chance to experience their own strength, resilience and power because they have so few opportunities to test these?

Why celebrate a drug that was made to manage the ills of society – as implied in the author’s relating that “camp was intended as a powerful drug” that could cure cultural ills and her assertion that “if camp works like a drug, then coming home means experiencing withdrawal. That crash is not something that can be avoided. In fact, it’s a sign that camp worked in exactly the way it’s meant to.”

Instead, why not invite a discussion about how to address the cultural sickness itself, and in particular the educational sickness that limits the lives and experiences of young people, enveloping them in a pressure cooker that often makes them feel crushed by stress and frustrated by a lack of autonomy? 

And why, rather than offering parents advice on how to manage the drug crash couldn’t we instead ask how we can work to make children’s lives so enriching that they don’t need a drug to raise them above the tedium?

Why suggest to young people that deeply bonding experiences with friends can only happen during the liminal experiences they have during camp – when they are given the right to invest time in these relationships?

Instead, why not create social spaces in their daily lives where they can engage in these deeper, more slowly evolving, more collaborative and adventure-based forms of interaction? 

SOP Strikes Again

The approach the author took in this article can only be the result of SOP – school-as-the-only-path: that universal religion that leads people from all walks of life to assume that ‘real’ life for young people can only be experienced through school and all the limits, mindsets, activities and adjacent institutions that are proposed in order to support, reproduce and cure some of the problems that school itself creates. 

Only SOP could lead us to rationalize the stringent limits place on children’s freedom and experience rather of asking big questions about why things that are fun, inspiring or interesting are relegated to a ‘bubble’, an after school activity, a rare treat, a field strip, an internship, a luxury, a dream, or simply an impossibility.

The author’s last line says it all: “camp is supposed to feel different from — and, frankly, better than — home. That’s what gives camp its life-changing power.”

Camp only has to be life-changing if the life it is changing is unhappy. 

If we focus on ameliorating the daily lives of children so that they are engaged in meaningful, community based, collaborative, interesting and liberating activities, camp might be the experience children are bored with.