Successful Counseling - camp counselor tips

Camping Magazine, May, 2001 by Randall Grayson

Find the right approach for working with campers

* Mike and Diaz are arguing about who is going to play goalie on the soccer team.

* Cody takes Logan's ball glove without asking

* Elizabeth continues to use inappropriate language although you've repeatedly asked her to stop.

How would you handle these situations? Your response tells a lot about your approach to counseling and getting the desired behavior from your campers. Behavior management is more than getting campers to comply with your requests and camp rules, however. Behavior management includes helping campers develop social skills and emotional intelligence. It is about helping them understand their emotions and behavior and learning better ways to get their needs met.

Let's take a look at five styles of counseling and then focus on the method recommended by psychologists and other experts in child development, success counseling. As you read, keep in mind these important points.

* People often have a preference for a particular style, but they sometimes use other approaches depending on the situation.

* All of the methods are effective at controlling behavior, but only success counseling is effective in developing pro-social children.

* The predominant approaches utilized by new counselors are punishment, guilt, and the buddy method.

Punishment

Anger, criticism, humiliation, and corporal punishment are all forms of punishment. Doing pushups, running laps, yelling, and the arbitrary removal of privileges and rewards are common examples. Exasperated staff and those under a time crunch are particularly prone to using this approach. In the short term, it is very effective and fairly easy; however, there are problems that make this approach inadvisable.

* Campers usually learn only that the behavior resulted in punishment; they do not learn how to change the behavior in order to still get their needs and objectives met.

* Compliance will only happen when there is sufficient strength enforcing it.

* Compliance because of anything external is ultimately ineffective. The individual's psychological reaction is usually resistance, secret defiance, or surface compliance so that he can retain some sense of control and dignity. Children's focus is often on anger instead of reflecting on what they did. Sometimes they just think about how to avoid getting caught the next time.

* Campers may internalize that they are bad people, which degrades self-esteem. While high self-esteem isn't everything, a low to moderate self-esteem is certainly unhealthy.

* Punishment closes the communication door and makes it difficult for people to take responsibility and be honest.

Guilt

Inducing guilt can take many forms. Silence with a look of disapproval, a sigh, and a slow shaking of the head are nonverbal methods. Common phrases may include "You know better" and "I'm really disappointed in you."

Guilt can be more effective than punishment, because the authority preventing the action rests in the camper instead of some external power. Guilt is instilled, internalized punishment. Guilt is the reference to the rule or norm and the implied or stated fact that the child is bad for not adhering to it. While a child may feel guilty, the choices are to accept that he is really bad, to reject the norm and try not to get caught the next time, or ideally, to make some restitution and learn how to behave differently in the future. As with punishment, guilt does not teach the camper how to replace the behavior that resulted in guilt, while still having his needs and objectives met.

The Buddy Approach

Like S'mores, this is a camp staple. The counselor attempts to control campers with friendship and humor. "Come on, guys!" and "I'm nice to you, you be nice to me!" are common refrains. This method is popular because it works well on several levels.

* Campers will like their counselors and will often comply because they like them and don't want to disappoint them.

* Campers know that their counselor must comply with the camp's rules. Therefore, when those rules force their counselor buddies to be the bad guys, campers don't blame them since "it's just the system."

As with sugar, there are down sides.

* When authority is blamed, campers don't learn to behave because it is the right thing to do. They behave because they must or be punished. Their compliance is gained, and their conversion lost.

* The buddy approach can lead to dependency. Behavior should not depend on liking a person in authority. The ability to develop an internal focus of control is hampered and responsibility is often not taken.

* When a counselor must eventually correct or punish a camper, the camper will be confused and wonder, "But aren't you my buddy?"

* Campers may also take advantage of the friendship by essentially blackmailing the counselor into allowing them (implicitly or explicitly) to do what they want. Buddy adults occasionally bend or break rules in favor of the kids, teaching campers that they can get away with their behavior without the ultimate authority figures finding out.