The weight of the world: why camp is ever more important - 1993 Cal-West Camping Conference keynote address - Repositioning Camp For The Future

Camping Magazine, March-April, 1994 by Daniel L. Dustin

While I am aware of the pitfalls of romanticizing the past at the expense of the present, and while I understand that today's children are, in many respects, better off than yesterday's, my point is that childhood, that blissful state of ignorance into which so many of us were born, that extended state of care when so many of our parents protected us from the harsh realities of the outside world, that playful time so many of us look back on as adults with fondness, is growing shorter and shorter for each new generation of children. I'm suggesting further that this is so, in part, because adults have chosen to pass down to children what is known about the world sooner rather than later. Fewer secrets are kept from children. And as a consequence, increasing amounts of innocence have been struck from children's lives.

How has this come about? In her book Children Without Childhood, Marie Winn discusses how our society has changed its child-rearing philosophy from protecting children from the outside world to preparing children for that world. The way we raise children has been altered by a host of social and cultural upheavals including the disintegration of the traditional family, changing work patterns, and of course, television. Whether it be economic necessity propelling two parents into the work force, a single parent having to be both homemaker and breadwinner, increasing numbers of women seeking careers outside the home with little reciprocity from their spouses within the home, or simply an increasing reliance on television as a baby sitter, the net effect has been that more and more children are left alone to fend for themselves.

To prepare children for this reality, we teach them self-sufficiency. We accelerate their growing up. This seems especially necessary since the dangers children face today are different from dangers past. Their danger is up close and personal in a way mine never was.

Since it's virtually impossible to shelter children from this kind of danger, we do what has to be done. We teach children to be skeptical, to be suspicious, to be cautious. We teach children that strangers are not to be trusted. We teach children to refute uninvited kindness. We teach children to be on guard. We don't want to teach children these things, but we feel we have no choice. The alternative is to turn children out into the world who are innocent, naive and, therefore, extremely vulnerable.

How sad for those of us who would want it otherwise, for those of us who would have our children grow up to be open, accepting, and trusting adults. How sad that we feel we have to harden our children so they might have a better chance of surviving. How sad that we now have to worry about our children surviving childhood. I am haunted by Alex Kotlowitz's recent book There Are No Children Here, a study of two boys growing up in a public housing complex in Chicago. Kotlowitz asked one of the boys, layette, what he wanted to be when he grew up. "'If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver,'" he replied. "If, not when. At the age of ten, Lafayette wasn't sure he'd make it to adulthood."