How camp gives kids a world of good: an interview with Mary Pipher - includes related article on Pipher's works - clinical psychologist, family therapist and author - Interview

Camping Magazine, Jan-Feb, 1999 by Marla Coleman

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."