I had known Brad since the early 1990’s when I started to work with Banner. As his friends and colleagues can attest, Brad could be determined when it came to his ideas about camp, business and family politics. And yet it always seemed to me that Brad was on a search. In his heart of hearts, Brad was a generous and giving man. Anyone who had the chance to see him with his beloved dogs knew that, whether it was always apparent or not, Brad was basically a nurturing and giving soul—a caring master and a master caretaker.

All of this—his love of and belief in the essential goodness of camp; his determination; his searching; his generosity—came to the foreground when he, along with Dayna Hardin and a few other visionary folks, decided to bring S.C.O.P.E. to the Midwest. For those if you who may not be familiar with it, S.C.O.P.E. is a camp scholarship program pioneered in New York by Jay Jacobs. When Brad approached Jay about the idea of bringing S.C.O.P.E. to Chicago and the Midwest, Jay enthusiastically embraced it by making a personal donation to get it started.

All in all Brad’s work on S.C.O.P.E. may have been his finest achievement. Recently, at the now annual benefit dinner in Chicago that Brad helped establish, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award for that work. I, along with Jay Jacobs, made a point of being there to give him that award. It was a moving moment. Brad had been extremely ill and in the hospital all week, in and out of deliriums. It seemed doubtful, even as late as one hour before the event, that Brad would be able to be present. When I saw his parents, Allen and Helen Schwartz, and his sister Stacy, they all feared for his safety in coming to the event. The doctors had strongly advised against it.

Then, like a minor miracle, there was Brad at the eleventh hour, smiling as he was wheeled through the ballroom. When the time came to accept his award, he rose out of his wheelchair, walked to the podium on his own, climbed the stairs with a little help and gave a five minute talk about the impact camp can have on the lives of young people. Though halting in his delivery, Brad was clear and his comments poignant. I doubt there was a dry eye in the house. His family, who had watched over Brad all week, could hardly believe what they saw. Such was Brad’s determination! Such is the strength of the human spirit!

It was a gift to have witnessed this miracle. And yet, I can’t say that I was totally surprised. Camp has a way of bringing out the best in people. It certainly brought out the best out in Brad and it was on full display that Friday evening, April 29. Two weeks later Brad was gone.

As I think about it I realize that camp doesn’t just give to children, it gives to the people who make it their life’s work to make camp possible. Sometimes we need a forum—an arena—for our best selves to show up. This has certainly been true for me, and I suspect it is true for many of the wonderful people I have had the privilege to know in my work with the greater camp community. Brad was one of those people.

Once children “get” what we are trying to say, if we continue to talk we are actually impeding or interrupting them from assimilating the insight or line if reasoning we have just shared with them. The human brain cannot consciously attend to more than one thing at a time. By making children listen to us go on and on, we are preventing them from mulling over or internalizing what we have just said. It’s one or the other—they can’t do both at the same time!

Once we have made our point plain, belaboring our message may make us feel better, but it then becomes a way of humiliating and belittling the child. Creating such feelings in a child may do a great job of making them feel resentful (and in turn, less compliant) but it probably actually works against any hope of them actually taking in what we are saying. We have to make a decision: Is our intention to make a child feel bad or change their behavior?

Because of the popularity of texting, instant messaging, Twitter®, e-mail and other virtual and electronic forms of communication, children are used to picking up critical bits of information in very short bits. They may actually be better at teasing out the essential part of what we are saying than we are in saying it! “Brief” is the hallmark of modern communication!

Being brief does not mean we can’t be thorough. It simply means getting to the point quickly and then ending for maximum impact.

Social networking programs have certainly allowed people to stay in touch with one another or find one another years after high school or college. The chief advantage of social networking, of course, is the fact that they help us overcome time and distance as a constraint to keeping in touch with people. But as Robin Dunbar, a British social scientist who has done a fair amount of research on the phenomenon of “friending,” what Facebook© has not done is change the fundamental nature of who we are as human beings. After all, it takes a certain amount of social capital—attention, time, hard work and considerable emotional investment—to maintain a close personal friendship. So whether you have 100 “friends” on your Facebook© page or 1,000, the people you are most likely to correspond with are those you see offline in everyday life anyway.

As Dr. Dunbar writes, 40 percent of the precious little social time each of us has each week is devoted to the five people in our lives we are closest to, whether they be family or friends. Dunbar says this represents about 3 percent of our social world. His research suggests that the largest number of people one can truly have a meaningful relationship with online or offline is 150. In his words, people on our social networking sites beyond that number are simply “voyeurs.” When we share something on our profiles, we are simply “broadcasting” that information, which indeed allows large numbers of people to “keep up” with us, but it doesn’t really change or deepen the experience we have socially or emotionally.

For teenagers especially there seems to be great appeal to “broadcasting.” After all, if you just aced your algebra test in high school, it seems to be more satisfying to tell and get sympathy from 300 people that it is to tell and get sympathy from only two or three. That said, teenagers often have trouble realizing that what they post on their sites is there not only for their “friends” to see, but for the other 599,999,600 people who are on Facebook© who might care to look. Indeed, Teens seem to have this problem with technology in general. A case in point is the practice of “sexting,” or sending a nude or semi-nude picture of oneself or someone else via text message. In the New York Times dates Sunday, March 27, 2011, there is a front-page story about how one teenage girl sent a text to her boyfriend, only to have him pass it on to several other people after they broke up. Eventually, most everyone in her class had seen the picture, embarrassing the girl to the point where it made it impossible for her to remain at that school.

One area camps might consider is the area of positive digital education—teaching campers ages 12-15 what is appropriate and real about electronic forms of communication. A discussion of values—how to respect yourself and others—as well as knowing when to use a text, an e-mail or when to pick up the phone and call would also be helpful. Given that children today have grown up with chat rooms, texting, e-mail, Twitter© and other forms of electronic communication, they take them for granted. This does not mean, however, that they have learned the values that go with such communication. Like many things kids learn through social osmosis, sometimes the values part of the learning needs to be reinforced or highlighted by the caring adults in their world.

Working as I do with teachers in schools across the country I hear so often teachers lamenting about “the teacher I’ve had to become!” There is no time and no room in the “race to the top” for creative thinking or experiential learning. It has become so much “skill and drill.” While it is true that there will always be a fair amount of memorization and learning from reading, things like shop, woodworking, music, art and other experientially based learning forms have become increasingly scarce in public schools. Everyone is too busy boosting test scores.

Couple this emphasis on “top-down learning” with the fact that children engage in spontaneous, creative, exploratory play less and less, and you have a generation of children who think Nature is something you put on a t-shirt and who do not have the benefits creative play offers. As reported in the Michigan Public Television documentary from 2007, “Where Do the Children Play?” the radius of play for children in the United States has shrunk from about 1 mile to less than 550 feet in less than two decades. David Elkind tells us in an Op Ed piece for the New York Times that children have lost about 12 hours of free time since 1994 and you have children whose learning is increasingly less experiential. Given that they are spending ore and more time looking at a screen—the television, computer, electronic games, and that mobile computer in their hand masquerading as a cell phone—and you have children who have a huge vocabulary and know a lot of stuff, but who do less critical problem-solving, less creative thinking, less socializing and get less stimulation from working with their hands.

Camp, on the other hand (pun intended) is all about experience. It is not just that the activities are hands on, like in rocketry, jewelry making, pottery, art and so on; or that children get a lot of exercise in basketball, baseball, soccer and the like. It is the fact that at camp children have the opportunity to live in groups and solve group living problems; experience appropriate, real fear (from getting on a horse to going down a zip line); and learn from counselors who are generally one or two developmental steps ahead of them. You don’t have to memorize something that is already memorable, as so many things at camp are.

My point? Schools could learn a lot from camps about how to bring kids together, build community, learn from experience and include hands-on experiences in their curriculums. As a society we would do well to broaden the scope of what we mean when we talk about education. Camp is, in so many ways, educational, not just recreational. At camp children so critical thinking, work on tasks of emotional development (“growing up stuff”), learn social skills and generally strengthen their overall resilience and coping skills. Camp and school would be a great partnership in the education of the while child.

to go out the window. the key to praising children is to keep it brief and make it specific. For example, a parent might simply say, “that was the best paper!” and not mention specific aspects of that paper, like the clever opening or or the clear recitation of facts or the way the ideas flowed or the way it caught your attention at the beginning. At camp counselors should praise kids in specific ways–like what it was about the way they helped one another during clean-up; or how they cooperated when they came up with a skit for the talent show; or how they encouraged other in the game they played. the other thing is that children appreci-

ate honesty. they might not like hearing about their faults or short-comings, but they know when they did something wrong or didn’t perform well, and pretending otherwise only makes children feel like they can’t trust us to tell them the truth. that truth can be delivered in a sensitive way, but it needs to be delivered if campers are going to benefit from their mistakes. After all, what is the point of making mistakes if we can’t help children learn from them?!

The above example illustrates both a business-like even handedness, calm voice and a few well chosen words. You were even able to acknowledge Johnny’s feelings while asking him to help out with clean-up.
What’s missing, of course, is that at camp you spend long hours with campers. It does happen that your patience can wear thin! Knowing when to take breath, take a mini-time out or get help are key to doing your job well, too.
Stop, Start, Continue
When you think about camper behavior I think you will agree that most all of it can be put into three categories. Campers are either doing something we don’t want them to do—things we want them to stop; or they are not doing things we want them to start doing; or they are doing things we want them to continue doing. “Start, stop, continue” is a phrase I first heard from a friend of mine, Jay Frankel, who does a lot of corporate and camp training regarding adult staff. As I thought about it, I realized the phrase applies equally well to camper behavior.
What is useful about thinking this way? It turns out that we use very different strategies with campers depending on whether we want them to start, stop or continue doing something. What you would use to have a camper stop teasing another camper is very different, for example, from what you use to get them to start cleaning up or go to an activity.
Start Strategies
There are several start strategies. Like anything we do with children, they need to be adjusted to fit the age group you are working with at the time. Getting campers to start doing what they are not is best addressed by building momentum. In other words, get the least resistant, most cooperative campers to start first, then, one by one, focus your attention on the remaining campers who still need to brush their teeth, get out of bed, go to an activity, etc. Another start strategy is to make a challenge out of something, like campers racing against counselors, as in who can get it done or get there first. Another is to play personal best, where you keep a chart or simple log of the time it takes for everyone to have their clothes picked up, or get in line or get to the next activity. Campers then try to “beat the clock” and come up with their personal best time. Other strategies include doing “countdowns,” where you count down from, say, 10 to 1, by which time everyone one needs to be in compliance. Or giving special privileges or surprises as motivation, or handing out “fuzzies” or similar tokens (stickers work well with younger children).
The key to all start strategies is the energy level and participation of counselors. If you are attempting to get campers to clean up their cabin while directing them from your bed, they will listen to your “prone body language” and not your words! If you are helping out in an up beat, fun way, your enthusiasm will be contagious.
Threatening campers is not an acceptable start strategy. It is simply an act of desperation that shows you have lost the upper hand with your campers. If you find yourself resorting to threats, get help either from fellow staff or your Unit Director or Head Counselor.
Another “start” strategy involves a different kind of persuasion or influence, which my friend, Jay Frankel, calls “getting on your camper’s train.” I call it “putting money in the bank with your campers.” Take the example above where Johnny is playing his video game and refusing to clean up. If the counselor were to sit with Johnny for 90 seconds and ask him about his game—in other words, enter his world momentarily—the counselor can join Johnny in his enthusiasm, giving him a better vantage point for then persuading the boy to help out. It might go something like this:
You (As the counselor): “Johnny, I need you to help clean up now!”
Johnny: “I can’t! I’m not finished playing my video game!”
You: “Oh, cool! What game are you playing?”
Johnny: “Planet Defenders!”
You: “Cool! I’ve never heard of that one. How does it go?”
Johnny: “It’s complicated. I can’t explain it right now, I’m in the middle of a game!”
You: “Well it looks pretty cool. Maybe after clean-up, if we have enough time, you can show me. I have an X-box at home and it’s pretty cool!”
Johnny: “But I’m playing now!”
You: “I know, and it is hard stopping in the middle of a game. And there will be plenty of time for that. In fact, if you get started now, I can help you and then if we get done fast enough, you can show it to me. I’d love for you to show me how it works. And there’s always time at rest hour!”
Johnny (Reluctantly): “Oh, okay.”

As Johnny’s counselor, you were reasonable, you were “on message,” you were calm, but you also took a few moments to enter his reality, which allowed him to give up his game and join you. Smart counselor!

Stop Strategies
Getting campers to stop an undesirable behavior requires qualitatively different strategies. I have already described the first line of action, which is to state clearly, calmly and firmly what you expect, focus only on one or two requests at a time, stay out of arguments, repeat your request once if you need to, then let go. It is the “let go” part most counselors have trouble with. Hovering over a child only makes them feel you do not trust them and elicits resistance. It may help make you feel like you are more in charge, but it is not what smart counselors do. State what you expect and then detach. Turn your attention to someone or something else for a moment or two. Give your camper a chance to comply.
“State what you expect, then detach” is one of the few stop strategies that is also a start strategy. In other words you can us it in both instances. From there things diverge. If a child does not comply and stop an unwanted behavior, the rule of thumb is to separate them from their audience. That either means having the camper step aside with you away from the group, or having your co-counselor or other adult move the group onto their next activity, etc. Once a camper can no longer “play to the audience,” you get better listening and better compliance. All smart counselors know to do this—they just forget, sometimes, in the heat of the moment.
Another stop strategy is to give your camper a momentary time out. I use time-outs not so much as punishment, but as a way of allowing a camper to regain self-control when they have gotten too agitated or need to calm down. There are two rules: Always prompt a camper first by giving them the choice. It sounds like this:
You: “So, Sally, are you telling me you need a time out?”
Sally: “No!”
You: “That’s great! So then that means to you can stop yelling at your friends.”
Sally: “But they’re being mean to me!”
You: “There are other ways to get people to listen to you, and I can help you with that, but not yelling. So are you telling me you can try something else and you don’t need a time out?”
Sally (complaining, but complying): “YES!”
You: “Great! So let’s work this out. I’ll help you.”
Once a camper does need a time out, the rule of thumb is one minute for each year old they are. At camp, ten minutes for a ten year old is a long time. Simply make it long enough whether you feel a camper has calmed down and is willing to try something else. By the way, smart counselors know that for campers to stop doing one thing they need to have something else that is acceptable to do in it’s place. A child who is hitting may need to use his words. Sally may need to learn how to say something in place of swears what she feels other girls are being mean to her.
Having a lot of strategies is something that comes with experience. One thing that is clear is that smart counselors know that it takes no skill and no work to be rude, to be defensive or to be emotional with campers. To be thoughtful, have self-control and make a difference takes time, effort and practice. Smart counselors make camp the powerful growing experience that it can be for children. And that makes all the difference!

When contacted, his parents were angry and defensive. They wondered why the camp had waited so long to inform them of their son’s misbehavior. It seemed to them that they were being notified at a point when the camp was ready to send Alec home, which made them feel helpless and resentful. They also claimed that Alec “never did such things at home,” and questioned whether the counselors were somehow “singling (their) son out”—a tune eerily similar to the one Alec had crooned just days earlier! They also felt Alec was the “victim of poor supervision,” implying that he would never have gotten his hands on that rocket engine had the rocket counselor been more watchful. Reasoning this way, it was not too much of a stretch for them to say that they felt Alec was being “punished” for the poor performance of his counselors.

Just to make things more interesting, it came out during the exchanges that ensued between the camp director and Alec’s parents that Alec took a psycho-stimulant medication for attention and impulsivity while in school, a fact the parents had not previously mentioned. They had decided to take him off that medication for the summer without telling the camp.
As a camp director, were you to find yourself in this situation, you would probably be experiencing a range of reactions. You might worry about campers getting hurt by Alec. You might fear the impatience or anger of parents whose campers have already fallen prey to his aggression. You might feel defensive or angry in the face of Alec’s parents’ accusations. You might experience a bit of self-recrimination for not having found a way to make things “work” for this boy, and maybe even protectiveness for your staff, whose patience with the boy would be wearing pretty thin by now. With all this swirling about, how would you respond to these worried, angry, fearful parents? Let’s walk through it step by step.

The very first step is to take stock of your feelings. The worst thing would be to get into a heated exchange and have your feelings get the better of you. While it is human to have feelings, it is not professional to let them have you! What you and your camp don’t need is to have your feelings dictate your responses. Stall for time before returning that phone call if that’s what it takes to get your emotions in order.
Second, resist the temptation to get into a blame game with the parents. Maybe things would have been different had Alec been on his meds, but rubbing that in his parents’ faces doesn’t further your cause. Trust me, underneath it all they feel terrible. Part of their attack is an attempt to deflect the guilt they already feel. Don’t fall into that trap. Take the high road. Acknowledge your mistake up front—you should have called earlier! That you may have wanted to give Alec the benefit of the doubt and time to work things out (which is true) should not distract from the sincerity of owning this mistake. Parents do not like surprises!
Likewise, don’t get into an argument about their statement that “Alec never does this sort of thing at home!” The best response to their claim, far fetched as it may seem to you, is to accept it at face value. It just might be that he doesn’t act this way at home. (He just acts that way in school—thus the meds! But you won’t mention that!) “Children act very differently depending on what group or situation they are in at the time,” you explain. “Alec probably doesn’t behave at your holiday dinner table the same way when he’s outside with his friends with no adults around.” It just might be that Alec just isn’t ready for the kind of group living situation that comes with camp. Some kids are more comfortable with it than others.
You will also wait for an opening to mention how hard this must be for them to hear. No parent likes to be told their child is struggling. If you have a moment when you sense they are more open, you can add that, from the sound of it, Alec has probably not had an easy go of it. If they ask you why you say this, you respond with your knowledge that kids with ADHD, which you assume Alec has been diagnosed with since he is on medication for it in school (remember, you are not a qualified diagnostician!), often have struggles others kids don’t have.

Let’s also consider their claim that Alec is being punished because of poor counselor performance or supervision. This argument avoids the reality that Alec seems determined to get into things that are of such danger to himself and others that he would need constant, one-on-one supervision. This is not what camp is about. Children must take some responsibility for behaving in such a way that they can be trusted. Given that Alec is sneaky, that he refuses to stay with his group and that he is intent on breaking rules, the amount of supervision that would be required to keep him safe is not appropriate in a camp setting.
Remain firm. Maybe you could have called them sooner. Maybe you could have thought together about better ways to manage Alec. The bottom line is that Alec has now crossed a line where you can no longer guarantee his safety or the safety of other campers. Resist the temptation to say how other parents are understandably upset about what their sons are experiencing at Alec’s hands. While true, no parent is interested in what other parents or campers might think. We wish they did, but they don’t, and saying so only weakens your position. It is enough that Alec has behaved in such a way where his safety and that of others can not be assured. He simply cannot stay at camp because you can’t guarantee that safety. Next year is another year, but for now Alec must go home.
Looking Back
Parents today are more concerned about how their children are treated by other caretakers. With all that is in the news about trusted adults mistreating children, how could they not be? Overall, parents probably should be called sooner than you might have done in the past. The point is to learn techniques like the ones I have outlined here for defusing difficult conversations while maintaining the integrity of your program. When parents are not being their “best selves” with us, it is crucial that we find ways to be “our best selves” in response. To be your best self not only serves these parents and this camper, but your reputation as a fair-minded, principled professional and the good name of camp

For more techniques, go to www.ACACamps.org/handouts for a copy of the handout from Bob’s opening keynote address with Jay Frankel and the True-to-Life Training Company at the 2006 National Conference in Chicago.

What they did bother him about was his bragging. Once, while preparing to play baseball with his group, as the boys were lobbying for what field position they wanted to play, Damian spoke forcefully and convincingly about why he should be allowed to pitch. He claimed that he had had a lot of experience and was the best they’d ever seen. After a miserable outing, it came out that he’d never pitched before in his life! The boys on his team were furious with him. Had he not been so vocal about his prowess as a pitcher, they wouldn’t have been so let down by either his performance (which cost them the game) or the fact that this was his first attempt at it. Had this been an isolated incident, one could see how Damian might have just wanted to try something he’d never done before (camp after all is a great place to try new thing). For Damian, however, bragging was a sport in itself.

Damian bragged about places he had traveled to, stars he had met, achievements he had accumulated and skills he had perfected—all of which were either grossly exaggerated or wholly untrue. It got to the point that whatever he said, the other boys, because they could never trust him, would ridicule him or react with hostility. They were so offended by what they considered lies that they began to tease him mercilessly. During times like this Damian would lash out physically at his tormentors who in turn felt that they were justified in their reactions because his claims were so outrageous. Of course, their hostility did nothing to sway Damian from his habit, but only brought out his aggression. You and I might think, hmmm, here’s a kid who, given what he’s been through, is understandably insecure about himself and therefore tries to “build himself up” by embellishing things about himself. We might even be right. The question is, as it always is at camp, what can be done about it?

It was decided that I would talk with Damian myself. After securing permission from his parents to meet with him one-on-one, I sat down with him. I made it clear that I knew about Tourette’s—that I had seen several guys in my practice who had had it—and then also told him that I knew his camp friends had been giving him a hard time. I asked him to describe what it was they had been doing that had been upsetting him so and just listened for a while. I then asked him if he had any idea what it was that made the other boys taunt him as they did. I didn’t expect him to give me an answer that accounted for his part of the problem and he didn’t. This, of course, was all just “setting the table.” I was now ready to serve up the main course.

“So, Damian,” I started, “I can see you are truly bothered by what the other boys sometimes do—in fact, it has gotten you so riled up that you’ve been in danger of getting into trouble over it. I don’t think you want that to happen. In fact, I think you’d like the boys to treat you differently or you wouldn’t be here talking to me.” He agreed.
“So, let me ask you…if there was one thing you could do to change things, would you be willing to do it?”
“Sure,” he said. “But, I guess it depends on what it is.”
“Good answer!” I replied. “How about this,” I continued. “How about if before you do or say something to the other boys, you stop first and ask yourself one question. Would you be willing to try that?”
“Um, I guess so. What’s the question?” he asked.
“Will what you are about to do or say make the other boys respect you more, or respect you less. For example, will lashing out at them make them respect you more, or will it make them respect you less. I don’t want you to answer me now; I just want you to ask yourself that question each and every time you go to do or say something in front of the other boys.
“See, I think what you really want is for the boys to respect you. I think you want it so bad that you’ve sometimes exaggerated things you’ve said to try to get it. And I have a hunch you can get it, but only if you ask yourself that question first. For example, if you keep playing or keep working at something even though you are feeling hurt or angry, would that make the other boys respect you more, or respect you less?”
Had Damian been 11 years old and not 13, this approach might not have worked. Had he not been in pain, it most likely wouldn’t have worked. Had respect not been a key issue for him (for all boys his age), I would have been off the mark. But he was 13, he was in pain, he was hungry for the other boys to respect him, and I was able to talk to him in a way that was at once direct, but respectful. And it worked. In fact, he was able to make quite a dramatic turn-around. The camp director has the post camp letter from his grateful mother to prove it. Just food for thought!
One Thing at a Time
Marissa is an 8 year-old first time camper who is driving her counselors crazy. It’s her specialty. “We tell her three things to do,” one counselor tells me, “like, ‘put on your shoes, make your bed and put your dirty laundry in your laundry bag.’ She smiles and agrees, but within seconds she’s off doing something else. I feel like calling her parents and saying, ‘You have the most ADD kid I’ve ever seen!’”
I momentarily stifled my impulse to point out that 1) they were not qualified to make that judgment and hand her a diagnosis; 2) that her distractibility could just as easily been due to a number of things, including immaturity, adjusting the entirely new and very stimulating situation of suddenly having 8 or more “sisters” to share a room with (the season-long pajama party!) or not having her doting parents do everything for her (like lay out her clothes, pick up her things and so on). But I checked myself.

“Let’s try something else,” I said in quietly confident way. “Something simple and easy to do that we can build on. I’d like you both to follow exactly the same format for a couple of days and then we’ll see about tweaking it.
“First, tell her one thing and only one thing to do, like, ‘put on your shoes.’ Have her repeat that one thing back to you. Send her off to do it while you attend to other things, but first, instruct her to come back to you and tell you when she’s finished that one thing. Praise her when she comes back and announces that she’s done her one thing. Don’t go overboard; a simple, ‘Good job, Marissa! That’s great!’ will suffice. Then, give her a second thing to do with the same instructions. Then a third, and so on. One direction at a time! It may be somewhat tedious for you both at first, but 1) you can ‘tag team’ her so one of you isn’t always the one having to work with her; 2) you can continue to go about your business while she’s doing her one thing; 3) the praise she will get is like built-in sugar—she’ll come back for more; and 4) after a couple of days you can start experimenting with giving her two things to do in a row and save your praise for when she’s reported back to you that she’s done both things.”
Had Marissa been 12 or 13, this would not have worked. Had she not been eager to feel successful and win the approval of her counselors—something generally true of younger campers—it might not have worked. But it did work, which might mean we’ve discovered a “cure” for ADD after all!

The staff member you describe has some characteristics that raise my concern. Having what seems like stronger ties to boys than to his peers, coupled with what would appear to be a social-emotional life that centers on young boys, are both classic warning signs. You did not say whether he was married or in a relationship, but if he is single, it would only be another indicator that he has not developed a close, intimate bond with someone his own age.

Having highlighted these patterns, I hasten to add that none of these realities are evidence that he is doing anything inappropriate with the boys he spends time with. Everyone who enjoys working with youngsters gets a certain amount of emotional fulfillment from doing so. In the overall scheme of things it is part of what insures that children will get the care and attention they need from adults to thrive. However, the man you describe has no apparent adult outlet for his intimacy needs, and away from camp (or school) there is not the structure or presence of other adults to keep things in balance. In this regard this man is taking a risk in that he is leaving himself open to becoming emotionally over-involved with the boys whose company he keeps, which could result in hurt feelings, inappropriate intimate behavior (IIB), or an accusation, true or false, of an IIB. For these reasons it is no surprise that several parents have been concerned about boys sleeping over at this man’s house. At this point I can hear my readers asking the same question that is on my mind, which is, where are the parents of the boys who are staying over? It seems to me their children’s well-being is at some risk—a risk the parents must at least share—if they are being allowed to participate in these sleepovers.

You also never mentioned exactly what your camper parent’s question was about this man, but let’s assume it is a general question about his appropriateness with boys. What you will say is that he is great with kids and that you are lucky to have him at camp. You will add that you do not condone outings between staff members and campers outside of camp not so much because you don’t trust the people you hire, but because such outings do not have the built-in structure and safeguards of camp, which includes the presence of other campers and multiple adults. You might throw in the camper-to-staff ratio required by the ACA Standards, which is a way of insuring that proper supervision of children and adults is maintained, and that such a ratio would probably not be maintained once outside of the purview of camp. You might also say that as a general rule you do not recommend that parents allow their children to go on such outings, again because the kind of supervision or structure you have at camp would not be present. You will emphasize, of course, that this is the policy you have with regard to any staff member, not just this particular man.

The Internet Connection
Many camp professionals have spoken to me about their concerns of post-season communication and contact between campers and staff being fueled by the exchange of e-mail and IM addresses at camp. Some of this contact may be very positive, as it helps keep the nourishing experiences campers have at camp alive and helps maintain their connection to camp. However, as with any such communication, there is the challenge of oversight—one can never be exactly sure what is being communicated or whether that communication is appropriate. I wouldn’t always count on campers to tell their parents if the communication became inappropriate. For this reason I recommend that e-mail exchanges between campers and staff be allowed only with the awareness and approval of the camper’s parents. I suggest this policy be communicated to the staff both at the beginning of the summer and several days before the end of each session. I suggest campers and camper parents be informed of this policy both before and after camp. What you say is that you hand pick your staff and you stand by their ability to care properly for campers—in camp! That outside camp you cannot guarantee that the kind of supervision, oversight or program structure will be present. Parents should also be made to understand that staff members do not represent camp once the season is over (unless, of course, they are full time employees of the camp doing camp business).
Shift the Burden
What I am doing with this policy is shifting the burden of responsibility and oversight of campers back to their parents. If parents wish to allow their children to have contact with camp staff after camp, whether by e-mail or in person, you can not stop them. However, you can make it clear that they, not you, are then responsible for whatever occurs as a result. You, after all, have no way of knowing how the relationship between a staff member and a camper will develop outside of camp.
Sensible Guidelines
As in the case of your veteran staff member, if parents do decide to allow their children to see or have contact with camp staff outside of camp, you might, after clarifying that parents do so against your advice, suggest they at least follow some guidelines in such instances. Those guidelines would include no one-on-one outings between a child and an adult. In other words, other people should be included in any such outing, preferably another adult. It would also be inadvisable for a child to sleep over at a staff member’s house, and if a staff member were invited by the family to stay at the home of a camper, he or she should be in a separate room and not with the child. In the case of the boys from school staying at their guidance counselor’s home, those parents (and the guidance counselor himself) are taking a risk. At minimum there should be other adults present and the boys should sleep in a room separate from the adults. It should also be made clear that by recommending these guidelines, which is optional on your part, you are not implying in any way that you or camp then takes responsibility for whatever does or does not happen.
The safety of campers is and should be a top priority for all camp professionals—one camper parents share in.