I‘ve seen women weep before, but never with the sense of hopeless desperation that comes over them as they listen to their husbands begin their third hour of summer-camp reminiscences. When middle-aged men start recounting those Jimmy Carter-era camp-staff parties at which they drank grain alcohol and leapt over roaring fires, women are suddenly confronted with the full gamut of male infantilism, and their boredom overflows into heaving waves of exasperated rage.
But our wives need to see the other side of summer-camp nostalgia. I went to and worked at the Incarnation Camp in southern Connecticut for 14 summers, and a recent visit back produced enough treacly and Proustian reflections to ice a layer cake. It wasn’t only the memories of softball victories, M-80 pranks, and midnight swims that made me wistful, but the changes that have swept through American society since the 1970s. Those changes have altered even so self-contained a community as a summer camp.
Today, there are no more staff parties at Incarnation. There is no alcohol allowed on camp grounds at all. Last year, a few counselors had to be fired when they were caught drinking in their tent, whereas in my counselor days we kept bottles of Black Label in the fridge, and the only problem was making sure everybody ponied up for the beer fund.
Our roughhousing is largely forbidden too. Camp for many of us adolescent boys was one long bruise session. If you were walking down a path and one of the cool counselors came up and delivered a thudding blow to your chest, you would bask in the glow of his attention. We would give each other dead arms and Indian belly rubs. If your birthday fell during the summer, as mine did, the staff and campers administered a ritual pounding on your shoulder — one punch for each year with a few for good luck. Now, the Connecticut health authorities have tightened the definition of physical abuse and sexual abuse, so noogies (the application of knuckles to the scalp) and wedgies (the application of underwear waistbands to the torso) are also impermissible. A psychotherapist now briefs the staff every year on child abuse, how to recognize it, and how not to engage in it.
Punishments have changed as well. Some old folks who went to the camp in the 1920s remember their penalty for talking after lights out: The minister in charge would line them up in their pajamas at the end of the boat dock on the lake. Then one by one he’d push them into the dark cold water. When I was a camper, if we were pulled out of our tents for nighttime rowdiness, the counselors made us sit on the cold shower floor in our underwear, or under an outdoor night light where the bugs could eat us. These punishments would be unthinkable now.
I don’t mean to overstate the changes: Institutions carry on, preserving the same elan even as the generations roll by. One of my former campers, Derek Edwards, now runs the teenage portion of the camp, with impressive magnetism. And now that the fashions of the 1970s are back in style, kids are even dressed as we were, in canvas high-top sneakers and bell-bottoms. There are tie-dyed shirts hanging outside the arts-and-crafts shed and peace signs painted on the window, just as in my day.
But the detritus of the age of liberation has been adapted to a much different era. I was struck by how much more safety-conscious camp is, how much more protective it is towards its charges. Now, at Incarnation, everybody wears a life preserver while rowing on the lake; 20 years ago only the kids who couldn’t swim did. Now the state mandates that little snow fences be erected to enclose the beaches around the swimming areas, though the camp’s lake has over two miles of shoreline so the 75 yards of beachfront fencing won’t actually keep anybody from wandering into the water at other points. Now the deputy director attends risk-management courses in the off- season, and fills out accident reports each time a child is hurt in case of future litigation. Now parents fill out a card on who can pick the child up from camp, so some banished ex-spouse or dangerous uncle won’t come by for an illegal visit.
Incarnation is not atypical. Across the country there is a small wave of legislation designed to minimize camp risks. A proposal in Dallas would require counselors to accompany children on restroom trips. A Florida law requires background checks on all counselors. And the professional literature on summer camps is full of risk-reduction advice. “For most drills, [tennis] balls should be fed across the net. This protects the instructor should a camper lose control and overhit,” writes Robert Gamble, a tennis director at Camp Robindel in New Hampshire, in a typical article in the magazine of the American Camping Association. “Games should never include actions such as running backward, spinning until dizzy or diving or being propelled headfirst, ” writes Nancy Halliday in the same magazine. The social scientists who study camps have expanded their concerns to include “psychological safety,” which means that camps are supposed to reduce the number of competitive games because some kids lose. A popular guidebook called “Choosing the Right Camp” praises camps that don’t give out awards to campers who win competitions, but give out good-citizenship awards instead.
Not just in camp, but across the board in the United States, we have dramatically reduced our tolerence for childhood risk. Now we all dutifully strap our kids into car seats, and we’d be horrified if we saw any parent driving around with his kids wrestling in the back seat, the way almost all parents did a quarter-century ago. Now kids on skateboards or bicycles or even tricycles wear helmets and sometimes elbow and knee pads. Now parents who grew up singing the joys of the Woodstock nation are loath to let their own kids out of their sight, even if it’s just to bike around a suburban neighborhood. When I went to elementary school in Manhattan, we took the public buses to school alone. Now the crime rate is actually lower than it was then, but no parent would let a third- or fourth-grader ride unattended.
These measures have significantly reduced the numbers of children who are killed or badly hurt in accidents. And now that my own kids are approaching camp age, I have to admit I appreciate, sort of, the safety reforms my own camp has undertaken.
But still, the changes are a bit depressing. It’s clear that it is harder to run a summer camp these days than it was in the 1970s and early ’80s. It’s not only that the camp staff now have to face issues to which we were almost oblivious — like child abuse, 9-year-olds on Prozac, and many more kids from single-parent families. But generally, Americans now tend to see the world as a more perilous place than they did 25 years ago. All the polls show — and Bill Clinton won reelection by sympathizing with the finding — that parents feel they are losing control of their own families. Just consider the names of powerful organizations (the Children’s Defense Fund) and recent books and articles (The War on Children, The Assault on Parenthood, Raising Children in a Troubled Society). Now television news programs and the weekly magazines run a bone-chilling number of stories that play on the fear of the childhood death. The week I visited my camp, the cover of U.S. News & World Report showed an empty highchair in a ghoulish blue light. ” Dangerous Day Care,” warned the cover line.
You can come up with your own explanation for why we now regard the child’s world with such anxiety: the rise in illegitimacy, drug use, suicide, the coarsening of the culture, the litigation explosion, the rise in the divorce rates, the new trends in child development, which treat the first years as the make-or-break moments of life. But there’s no question that we now regard child rearing as a more fraught enterprise than we did decades ago, and we are much more serious about it as a result.
Many social critics still complain about the permissive way America treats its children, but they are fighting yesterday’s battle. Kids today are enveloped by rules, structures, and restrictions. American society is probably more protective of kids today than at any time since the Victorian era, maybe any time ever. It’s just that the structure is likely to take the form of safety regulations rather than moral codes. Today’s authorities talk about risk instead of sin, and health instead of virtue. Health-ism is moralism in acceptably modern garb.
After I returned from camp I rented Bill Murray’s summer-camp movie Meatballs, which was made in 1979, one of the years I was a counselor. The movie captures the extraordinarily permissive ethos of the time, and Murray’s character exemplifies the image some of us Incarnation staffers were trying to live up to. He is a disheveled counselor who arises from his bed each morning after a raucous night, flouts the official rules (he even rips up the camp rulebook and throws it in the trash), and is continually castigated for being unconventional and immature. But precisely because of his sense of amateur playfulness and his pranksterish daring, he is a wise and relaxed mentor for his kids.
The carefree attitude lionized in Meatballs presumes a benign view of life that no longer prevails: Kids won’t get pregnant if you wink at their frolics. People won’t drown if you let them go skinny-dipping at midnight. Chaos won’t result if you flout authority. And when I think back to my youth, I’m amazed at how that benign view permeated institutions. The 1970s were a time when colleges winked at underage drinking, when public high schools set up smoking rooms for the students (even though it was illegal for kids under 18 to smoke in most states), when Cheech and Chong were mainstream media stars. The fact that I we were returning to camp year after year was in itself a sign of the general playfulness of the zeitgeist. Now kids are drawn to specialty camps — soccer camps, computer camps, music camps — to master some skill, and many general camps like Incarnation are going under. Now counselors can’t return summer after summer through their twenties because there is more pressure on them to get summer internships that will prepare them for careers. In my day, we had Ph.D. students in fields like economics and astrophysics, aspiring writers and doctors and lawyers, all of whom chucked the grown-up world for the summer to return to Incarnation.
For campers and counselors like me, there were two great cultural avatars during those years that seem especially out of place today: Outward Bound and Summerhill. Outward Bound, a survival/adventure program, was supposed to encourage spiritual growth through ordeal. In our scaled-down version at Incarnation, we would spend nights alone in the forest without equipment, go on four-mile swims, and otherwise try to devise challenges that would supposedly lead to spiritual breakthroughs. In the teenage section of the camp, we built a challenge course that involved scaling high rocks and pulling yourself up cables. We went down fairly serious river rapids in nothing but a life preserver. We took terrifying leaps off sand cliffs at a nearby quarry. We were allowed to play Murderball, a Hobbesian game in which the only rule was that your team was to try by any means necessary to carry a soccer ball across a goal line. I shake my head now at some of the dangerous things we were permitted to do, but we and our counselors just assumed through all of this that nothing bad would happen (nothing did). Outward Bound seems to flourish today in the adult world, but at a typical camp it would seem too risky.
Summerhill, the other great cultural influence, was a school in Britain founded by A. S. Neill that gave children maximum freedom, relying on their natural curiosity to induce them to go to class. Neill published a book about his school in 1960, and over the next decade it sold more than 2 million copies in the United States alone. In the first paragraph of the book, he described his approach: “Self government for the pupils and staff, freedom to go to lessons or stay away, freedom to play for days or weeks or years if necessary, freedom from any indoctrination whether religious or moral or political, freedom from character molding.” In a camp environment, Summerhill seemed a pretty successful approach, though of course as we lifted restrictions on campers we applied massive doses of moral pressure to get them to conform to our wishes. We didn’t require that campers attend activities. We had long debates over when campers should be allowed to play their radios in their tents. And we had meetings once a week during which campers played a role in setting camp rules. We placed a tremendous emphasis on freedom, and gave some sovereignty to the kids. And I have to confess these efforts were invigorating.
It could be that those of us who enjoyed the permissive years were living off the cultural capital of past generations — that we inherited self- limiting inhibitions that weren’t passed along to those who followed us. Or that from that laxity came the world of latchkey children and single-parent families that now depends on tougher external rules to prevent disaster. I’d say my camp experience lends some support to that theory. Those of us who were staff in the ’70s and early ’80s tasted some of the pleasures of the period, but then got on, even in our mid-twenties, with pretty normal careers. Among my closest camp friends, there are now an eye surgeon, a lawyer, a think-tank head, a successful documentary filmmaker, a foreign-service officer, and so on. But the campers who came after us tended to have a much tougher time in their twenties. They had more problems with drugs and alcohol and depression than we did, though they do seem to be prospering as they enter their thirties, as if they had to take some years to teach themselves the lessons that previous generations had absorbed by osmosis. The campers of the ’80s were more adventurous with sex than we were at the same age — or, to put it more precisely, they had to go further sexually before they began to feel adventurous. Maybe the permissive era did breed its own destruction and require the sort of restrictiveness we have today.
And you can’t argue with success. Teenage drinking has been on the decline for the past five years. Teenage sexual activity has dropped by a third over the same period. The restrictive ethos has apparently had its effect. But one senses nonetheless that even many parents are queasy about the overwhelming protectiveness of contemporary culture. Many people seem to have a nagging fear that we’re creating a Nerfworld for kids, in which they are protected from bumps and bruises but also from the realities of growing up. Isn’t it likely that the new restrictions on children are just one more example of us baby boomers imposing ourselves on other cohorts like the cultural bullies we are? When we were young, we demanded that society emphasize freedom, and our elders did, for better or worse. Now that we’re in parenting roles, we emphasize safety, restrictions, and an incessant focus on developmental skills — all the things that give peace of mind to parents, even though these things might be stifling to children.
On this past visit to camp, I spent a lot of the time wandering around the lake and the 650 acres of forest the camp owns surrounding it. I have memories associated with many spots along those trails, and it occurred to me that the ones that come back most vividly have to do with some bit of naughtiness — the place where my buddy and I threw fireworks into the girls’ unit; the spot where, at age 9, some friends and I caught a chipmunk and cut him open to see what was inside; the clearing where, as counselors, we had a barbarian night, eating big steaks, wrestling (I still couldn’t find the pair of glasses I lost that evening), and engaging in other activities that will someday mar my confirmation hearings. Childhood friendships are sealed by misbehavior. And brutal punishments make childhood more real. Like the old folks reminiscing about camp in the 1920s, I vividly and fondly remembered the times I was called upon to withstand unpleasant punishment. Not everything good is safe and not everything dangerous is bad. And few things are as sweet as the memories of past irresponsibility.
And it occurs to me that one of the other things that I learned at camp was to be brave, or at least less cowardly than I would otherwise have been. Incarnation was and is an incredibly diverse camp. Some kids come from Park Avenue and schools like Exeter and Andover. Some kids come from Greenwich Village and the deepest groves of bohemia. Some kids come from the South Bronx, and have never been out of the city before (on the first night of camp one year, a kid looked up at the sky and exclaimed, “It looks just like the planetarium!”). But the social structure within the camp is not based on demographics or even athletics, but on courage. The kids we looked up to were the ones willing to take the most daring risks — to jump into the lake from the highest cliff, or take the toughest treatment from the biggest counselor, or go for the most glory on skit nights. I’ve read a lot of social-science literature about camp over the past few weeks, and I haven’t seen a single word about bravery, but I suspect kids know more about its importance than the experts do.
Zeitgeists shift so subtly that it’s only when you come back to a place after a long absence that you notice the change. Permissiveness has been replaced by protectiveness. Liberating children from oppression is out, and obsessive devotion to improving their developmental skills is in. Health and safety are the basis of a new Victorianism. I’ll never throw away my kids’ car seats or return to Summerhill days, but I for one would lobby for more of the childhood freedom of yore. Our wives may get tired of our recounting the daring summertime risks we took at 15, but believe me, we wouldn’t be who we are now, for better or worse, if we hadn’t taken them then.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
