SOME PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES UNMET

I have sometimes thought that a glimpse of the want of deep and genuine concern touching the education of children is to be gotten in the rise of summer camps in great numbers during recent years. I do not deny the place or value of a camp for children and youth. I have come into first-hand contact with some admirable camps for boys and girls and, as I looked at some visiting parents, could not avoid the regret that the separation between parent and child was to be of a brief summer's duration. Two months in the year of absence from the home can hardly suffice to neutralize the effect of ten months of parental presence and contact. I quite understand that the ideal arrangement in some homes would be to send the child to camp during the summer months and to send the parents out of the home, anywhere, during the rest of the year,  an arrangement that is not quite feasible in all cases.


In many camps children are sure to profit irrespective of the character of the home whence they are sent, but surely there are some camps a stay in which can but little benefit children. Now why do camps so speedily multiply, and why are children being sent to them in droves?
The summer camps meet a parental need, the need of doing something for their children with whom, parents do not know how to live. Why do parents find it necessary to send their children off to the woods in so-called camps charm of which lies in their maximum difference from hotels and in their parentlessness? The  haste with which children flock in multitudes to these camps is a testimony to the failure of their parents to live in normal contact with their children. I have no doubt this shows of the conflict certain to develop out of the stimulated difference in tastes between child and parents.

I believe that children, especially city-reared children with all their sophistications, should be brought closer to the simplicities of nature during their vacation period. But why not in the company when possible of parents? The truth is that parents are so little accustomed to living with their children that when the summer months force the child into constant contact with parents, the latter grow embarrassed by the necessity for such contact, and the camp is chosen as a convenient way out of a serious domestic problem. And some of these parents are the very ones who will later wonder that "our children have grown away from us."