Preserving Childhood- You're Welcome Professor Haidt
He hasn’t called to thank me for coming up with the idea of “preserving childhood” yet, but if and when he does, I will tell the noted social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation that he is welcome - more than welcome! I noticed he has been using this phrase - “preserving childhood” in some of his recent writings. He has a bit bigger audience than I do, and anything we can do to help parents, and all of us, understand that when we cease to protect our children from adult concerns, expectations, and temptations, we lose more than just a memory. We lose a generation.
The Anxious Generation isn’t a parenting book, per se, but there’s a solid amount of good parenting advice that can be taken from it. I have a love/hate relationship with parenting books. So often they have made me keenly aware of mistakes that I have made in my own parenting, or cast a fair amount of shame and doubt that I might have cursed them for life! I have made many mistakes as a parent, but without a doubt the largest one was to reward my 7th grader with the latest iphone for bringing home an excellent report card! If I had only known then what I know now!
Professor Haidt doesn’t doll out the shame, but rather offers concrete suggestions on how parents, and we as a society, can address the concerns around the well-being of children. It’s not always easy to establish these protocols retro-actively, but the success schools have made in banning phones in the classroom seems to be universally considered a “win.” We can credit Professor Haidt for that movement, I think!
15 years ago we were searching for a catchy phrase to describe our core function at Camp Mishawaka. We settled on, “Camp Mishawaka: Preserving Childhood since 1910.” This arose out of an awareness that children were coming to us with some deficiencies. (And I use that word carefully.) Not a vitamin or other deficit, but a lack of a sense of adventure, play, and wonder. Instead, many came with adult concerns, risk aversion, and a sort of burden that one might only find in a classic mid-life crisis. Am I enough? Am I doing enough?
Childhood, by its nature, is messy. And as a parent, and camp director, I can attest to my own desire to avoid a “mess.” But as I have come to accept this mess as part and parcel of our work here, I have come to embrace it. Not seek it - it finds us - but to accept it, and help kids navigate it. Hopefully they learn how not to make future messes, and in the full expression, help others avoid messes themselves. I often repeat the words of our Girls Camp Director, Mary Jane Curran. “If childhood is indeed something to be outgrown, we need to let kids inhabit it for a while - with all its messiness.
Camp Mishawaka preserves a childhood experience. It can even launch good adults!
