Why I Don't Want to Know How Happy My Son Is at Camp

I dropped Jonah off at sleepaway camp this week. 

He will be at Camp Ramah in New England for four weeks; he attended for two weeks last summer. Besides giving me a just-valid-enough excuse to take a boys-only road trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum and induction ceremony, camp drop off prompted me to reflect on what happens when children escape the parental gaze. Whether it is for a day of preschool for a younger child or a month of sleepaway camp for an older child, stepping away from one’s parents is a big opportunity for a child. 

Jonah finally has a chance to be out of my, and Shira’s, gaze. He finally has a chance to escape our incessant parenting – we are always checking in, reminding him, filling in the gaps when he forgets things. Wash your hands; brush your teeth; fill your water bottle; finish your homework. Do this; don’t do that; definitely don’t do that. 

The problem with parents is they never stop parenting. We have such a hard time just letting go and watching our child make their own way through life. 

The morning after camp drop off, I received three text messages from those near-and-dear to me, each remarking on how happy Jonah looked in the bunk pictures released that morning. Less than 24 hours after saying goodbye, I had three updates on his emotional status.

I do not want those updates.

Last summer, I made a pledge to myself that I plan to keep again this summer – to not look at the camp picture website at all (It helps that I’m not on any social media either). For me, the point of camp is not to know that Jonah is happy, but to know that he will be navigating new terrain without me there. For him to craft his own relationships, with people and the world, without me. Inherent to this goal is my lack of awareness of what he is up to.

It is a purposeful, productive distance.  It is an intentional discomfort.

This is a stance I have developed over fifteen years spent in preschools, nine years as a parent, and countless courses, books, and workshops on child development. It is not a stance that the parent or child can “turn on” when the child goes away to camp or college; it must be intentionally built over the years of early childhood. I believe it benefits the child, at all ages, far more than the overparenting trap that we all-too-easily fall into (or, framed differently, that society pushes us into).

Julie Lythcott-Haims captures this sentiment perfectly in her marvelous 2015 book, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success. We over-saturate our children’s lives with the constancy of our parenting. When we don’t stop parenting, we deprive young children of the necessary moments of struggle that allow them to not only learn new skills but, more importantly, to flex their muscles of resiliency. I wrote about children’s resiliency and parents-doing-less in March, and turn to clinical psychologist Jeree Pawl for what this looks like for infants and toddlers: “children’s experiences of mastery and competence are often born out of struggle and discomfort…the more parents intervene, the more they try to persuade, the more they try to understand, the worse it is.” 

Jennifer Lahey nails it in her 2016 parenting book, The Gift of Failure: The most important lessons are best learned when [children are] uninterrupted and free of adult manipulations and machinations. Those fights, tussles, silent treatments, and breakups are, despite the tears and heartbreak they cause, invaluable opportunities for growth. Squabbles are opportunities to be valued, not emergencies to be managed. 

This matches our approach to early childhood at the Gan, inspired by the practices of Reggio Emilia. Loris Malaguzzi, the “father” of the Reggio approach, writes, The interaction between children is a very fertile and a very rich relationship. If it is left to ferment without adult interference and without that excessive assistance that we sometimes give, then it’s more advantageous to the child. We don’t want to protect something that doesn’t need to be protected. It’s necessary that we believe that the child is very intelligent, that the child is strong and beautiful. Those who have the image of the child as fragile, incomplete, weak, made of glass gain something from this belief only for themselves. We don’t need that as an image of children. Instead of always giving children protection, we need to give them recognition of their rights and of their strengths.

The Gan is this place for our children. It is a place where we employ a strong image of the child, a place where teachers intentionally create opportunities for productive squabbles, for productive failure, for meaningful challenge, all while the child is outside of the parental gaze. Where we see children for what they can do, not for what they need help doing. For their strengths and resiliency.

Summer camp, and a Reggio-inspired preschool classroom, are reminders of the remarkable resilience that our children carry with them.

I know Jonah will have a great summer. I hope he will be happy for most of it. And along the way, I hope he encounters some unexpected challenges that I never see or hear about. My witness will be to his growth and maturation on the other side.

For now, he is on his own. And that’s just the way I want it.