Summer Camp Planning

Back in Virginia, summers for kids meant doing nothing. The neighborhood kids would loiter around all day, jumping on trampolines and drinking grape soda (though to be fair there seemed to be quite a bit of that during the school year too). Here in the Bay Area, summers are apparently when the true nature of parenting declares itself. During the school year, I can pretend that everyone else is normal, that all the other kids leaving school are also heading home to eat snacks and play. In reality, they’re probably all being shuttled off by ride services or grandparents to various lessons, but I don’t have to know that.

Then January hits, and with it circulated spreadsheets of camps. Well-intentioned parents coordinate summer schedules six months in advance, so they can get their kids and their kids’ friends into all the best camps before they fill up. The assumption on these calendars seems to be that every week should be booked, with either a camp or a transcontinental vacation. No wonder people say having more kids is too expensive—if you assume properly raising your kids includes flying them to Australia for vacation and shelling out $500-plus for sports camps at Stanford, it would be tough to have four (the two most common comments I get from strangers when out with all the kids are, “wow, you’re brave”—in a near-sarcastic, not encouraging, tone of voice—and “your husband must be rich”—which I find offensive on several levels).

The sheer options of camps has left me mostly in a state of paralysis of choice: every swim club and park has its version of a tennis-swim-arts combination camp; there are lego camps to promote citizenship, engineering, or themed along popular movies; every conceivable type of science, engineering, coding, visual arts, theater, dance, and sport camp is being run somewhere within a short radius of our house.

At heart, I would like to put our older kids in a few camps; the summer seems like a good time to get them to try some new things with short-term commitments, and some variety of routine may be good. But I think the reason I feel subliminally stressed by this whole venture has more to do with the undercurrent of the culture here. The way people approach summers seems to say that parenting is about out-sourcing and optimization. You outsource their care and teaching to specialized experts. You outsource their socio-emotional learning, their skill sets, their cognitive development, all according to the most recent research. You optimize their time, with never a wasted week. You optimize through comparative analysis, seeing what other parents are doing. In the end, you optimize for outcome, assuming you can maneuver your kids into success by controlling the right variables.

I don’t think I believe that. I believe parenting happens at home, where the difficult decisions aren’t which lego camp to put them in, but how to help a middle child develop self-confidence, or a strong-willed child learn to be a servant. I believe the most important things I want to teach my kids—values, worldviews, character; not just knowledge and skills—are best learned by modeling at home. I don’t think parenting is about optimization, but shepherding. Imputing skills so they can navigate a system for outward success isn’t as important as knowing them deeply, in every stage, and understanding how to reach and guide them in ways they need. Ultimately, I think about what I want for them in their lives—would it be nice if they went to an elite school? Yeah, I guess so; but what is more important is that they love and follow Jesus, that they marry the right person, that they grow in character (and when I think it’s crazy I’m thinking about colleges, I remember that line from Semple’s book Where’d You Go, Bernadette: “Let me rock it straight: the first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station”).

I think the conclusion we’ve come to is: spend no more than half the summer with the older two in camps. Go for low-key camps, not necessarily the most competitive or popular, based mostly on interest, though it’s okay for us to require one for the sake of pushing them to try new things. But mostly, I’m trying not to get sucked into this extremely pervasive sense of pressure and stress, which takes some level of conscious effort. It’s probably good preparation for the future.