COLUMN: Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda

By Tobin Barnes
The closest I ever got to summer camp when I was a kid was listening to the hit song “Camp Granada.” It was comedian Allan Sherman’s spin on getting sent away to something less than fantasy land:

“Hello Mudda,/hello Fadda,/Here I am at/Camp Granada./Camp is very/entertaining,/And they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining.

“I went hiking/with Joe Spivy;/He developed/poison ivy./You remember/Lenard Skinner;/He got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner.”

From the “Mudda” and “Fadda” stuff, we knew back then that summer camp must be something eastern big city kids went to. Give those pasty-faced urbanites some outdoor exposure.

Not our problem back here in SoDak. We were always outdoors. Come back inside, our folks would tell us to get back outside.

Where outside? All over the place. Back in the alley, over to the park, down at the crick. Often, it was digging holes in someone’s back yard. Man we dug a lot of holes. Come home at dark and have to take our clothes off on the porch, we were so dirty.

So we SoDak kids didn’t go to camp much, and specifically, I didn’t go at all. If anywhere, I went to work. From the age of seven, I had something regular to do every summer day. Yeah, that’s right, only when I was done busting rocks did I get to look for something fun to do.

My old man was always concerned that I get enough work experience. His work was finding me work. And now I’m a better man for it. Maybe.

But summer camp’s evidently still going strong back east. Problem is that many east coast parents get in the way of the outdoorsiness and rugged individualism the camps are meant to foster and that we SoDak kids took for granted.

Anyway, that’s the gist of a recent New York Times article by Tina Kelley.

It seems that clingy parents drive camp administrators to distraction with long-distance hand wringing about their little Johnnys and Janeys. The camps get bombarded with calls: “One wanted help arranging private guitar lessons for her daughter, another did not like the sound of her child’s voice during a recent conversation, and a third needed to know — preferably today — which of her daughter’s four varieties of vitamins had run out.”

One camp has an employee who does nothing else, from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m., than relay email and voice mail messages from parents to campers and back again. It seems these anxious parents expect nothing but the worst of outdoor fates for their children out in that fearsome rural wilderness of upstate New York.

The employee--a “parent liaison” for crying out loud--always prefaces her calls to parents with, “Nothing’s wrong, I’m just returning your call.” Makes you wonder why these edgy moms and pops chanced their kids’ lives in the first place on such a foolhardy experience as summer camp.

The Times story makes it sound like “catering to increasingly high-maintenance parents” has become a real pain in the butt for camp counselors. Parents want to have veto power on bunk placements, and despite camp rules, they want their children to have cellphones and ready access to their favorite junk foods.

Some parents decide that summer camp is a good time “to give their offspring a secret vacation from Ritalin.” In other words, let my wired kid get more wired with plenty of M&M’s and Twinkies. We’ll see how it works. After all, isn’t that what you’re getting paid for.

“One camp psychologist said she used to spend half her time on parental issues; now it’s 80 percent.”

To reassure parents that their children are fine and dandy on an almost hour-by-hour basis, camps started posting daily candid pictures of campers enjoying their activities. The brainstorm, however, back-fired.

Now “I have parents calling and saying they saw their child in the background of a picture of other children and he didn’t look happy, or his face looked red, has he been putting on enough suntan lotion, or I haven’t seen my child and I have seen a lot of other children, is my child so depressed he doesn’t want to be in a picture,” said Jay Jacobs, who has run Timber Lake Camp in Shandaken, N.Y., since 1980.

Obviously, camp administrators are concerned that all this parental interference is keeping the children from learning to handle problems on their own.

Amen.