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Monday, August 12, 2002 |
Joy to the world, all the boys and girls
Salon's lead story this morning is Summers at Camp Ethnicity, about "heritage camps" for children adopted from other countries. Unfortunately, it's part of their "premium content", meaning you need to be a paid subscriber to see the whole story. Adoption of kids from overseas is a quiet trend in the US; it wasn't until I read this story that I added up all the cases I knew of, and realized that I know of five such kids just among my coworkers that I know well enough to know some family details.It's interesting for its information, but its analysis is weak. It's hard to evaluate whether these camps are a good idea or not when there's no comparison to the experience of other kids at other summer camps: I suspect that many kids have the same complaints, whether they go to bible study camp, or music camp, or the traditional crafts-and-swimming camp. Yes, I'm sure that it's easy to find kids who wish they were doing something else (from the kids quoted, "hanging out" is what they want to do most), but that argument applies to lots of things that parents want kids to do. Would the author think that it was better if the kids spent the summer playing Nintendo?
Personally, I did what most kids did in the sixties: took the daily bus for two weeks every summer to a camp where we made "Indian" drums out of tin cans and pieces of rubber, painted pieces of styrofoam sculpture, hiked in the woods and got swimming lessons. The swimming lessons were useful; the rest has largely slipped out of my memory, but it was at least as useful as the way I spent the rest of my summer days growing up.
The point of the camp is to deal with the kids' differences, to address issues of identity and assimilation. Yet, in a lot of cases, the kids seem to have coped with, or not yet encountered, those problems. The young ones want pretzels; the older ones want to go home, be with their friends and hone their coolness.
