Camp Mac Blog

For over six decades, my family has been fortunate enough to see firsthand what my grandfather (“Mr. Mac”) knew when he founded Camp Mac back in 1948 – summer camp is good for kids.

And I’ll go a step beyond that – summer is good for kids. Summer was a “given” back in 1948. When Mr. Mac was Talladega County School Superintendent, kids had a full 3 months of summer – to spend time with family, go swimming at the beach, or in the lake – or even in the creek. To play ball, catch fireflies in a jar, play “Kick the Can” in the neighborhood until the street lights came on, go fishing with Dad, baking cookies with Mom, or spend a week getting spoiled by Grandmother.

Of course, in those days, kids didn’t have to wait until summer to have time for themselves. When you were a kid in the 40s and 50s (and even in later decades for some of us) – being a kid was your job and you worked at it every day! Sure, you had chores to do around the house, and you had homework, but after that, your life was your own! And you learned how to take care of yourself and get along with others and you made up your own games and your own rules without a coach or a referee or a uniform or a practice - and you played and you had fun and you grew up – and it seemed it would never end.

But it did end. It’s a different world today than it was in 1948 – many kids today are Under Pressure by well-meaning teachers and coaches and tutors and parents to push themselves harder and harder and take on as many activities as possible in hopes of getting accepted to a certain college or getting a scholarship – or even just keeping up with the family next door.

And that’s not just during the school year. Summers for kids are busier than ever before – there’s soccer camp and cheer camp and football camp and basketball camp and lacrosse camp and band camp and dance camp and travel ball (all starting with kids who are still 5 years away from being able to go to a PG-13 movie).

For older children there are “voluntary workouts” for every Jr. High and High School team that’s out there. And you’re warned that “if you want to be a part of the team” everything else has to take a back seat. And sometimes it seems that everybody, everywhere expects you to make their priorities, your priorities.

But if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority, and the focus isn’t on what you learn and how you grow – the focus is on simply trying to “fit it all in.” And childhood, rather than being a magical time of life, turns into a race you can never finish or a contest you can never win.

To top it off, summers aren’t what they used to be either. Not so many years ago, kids still had that full 3 month summer vacation like they did in 1948. And, without all of today’s pressures, summer seemed like it would go on forever. And when it finally did end, you almost looked forward to getting back in school again – summer was over and it was time for school.

But today, on top of having more summer obligations, kids have less summer than ever before. Many children have only 8 or 10 weeks of summer vacation before it’s time to be back in class. Kids are back in school, riding hot buses, doing homework and studying for tests – and Labor Day is still a month away. This is a picture I took at camp a few years ago – our campers are at flag raising about to begin another exciting day at camp, and local children are loaded on the bus heading back to school.

Sometimes we have to simply accept the things we can’t change and learn to live with them – but this is not one of those times! Across the nation, parents and teachers and kids themselves have said , “Enough – we want our summers back!” And legislators in a number of states are listening – Florida, Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and other states have passed school start date laws giving summer back to children and families.

Right now, the state of Alabama is one Senate floor vote away from restoring a full 12-week summer vacation to Alabama schoolchildren. The local school boards who pushed the start dates up to the first week of August are working hard to defeat the bill, but if you’re from Alabama, you can make your own voice heard by sending an automatic email to your senator here: School Calendar Bill Up for Final Vote Before Passage. Please forward the link to your friends and ask them to do the same.

(Note: After the Alabama House passed HB360 by a 62-30 vote on April 12th, the Senate passed the bill by a 25-10 vote on May 1st. The House concurred with the Senate amendments, and the bill was sent to Governor Bentley for his approval. He has not yet indicated whether or not he will sign the bill.)

We know summer camp is good for kids. And we know kids can’t have summer camp without summer. But as great as summer camp can be, summer itself is even greater.

With all the opportunities we give our children, the one that might be the most elusive might also be one of the most important: The opportunity to just be a kid – without a care in the world. Thinking back, isn’t that what you remember most about summer?

Just 2 more weeks of summer over 12 years of school is another 6 months of summer vacation for our children. What would you give to have 6 more months of childhood summer memories to think back on today?

“Courage” is a word you don’t hear used very often when people are talking about children in middle class America today.

It’s not that we don’t hear about courage – almost every day the news media tell us about the courage our troops show overseas, the courage shown by our firefighters or law enforcement officers, or the courage shown by an individual somewhere in the world who steps up in a dangerous or threatening situation. Or sometimes in situations that are neither one. In fact, it sometimes seems that the words “hero” and “courageous” are tossed about so freely by reporters and commentators that it makes the people they’re used to describe seem a bit uncomfortable. (ABC News video: What Does It Take to Be a Hero?)

However, in the safety-conscious, tightly-controlled, regulated and gated world that many parents work to create, children are shuttled in air-conditioned comfort and security from one carefully supervised activity to the next throughout the days and weeks that will ultimately make up their childhoods. These children rarely, if ever, find any need for courage when constantly wrapped up in a protective cocoon. But courage is what gives us the ability to stand up for what we believe, do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, be a true friend, and stand by and protect those who need our protection.

We teach a lot of things at camp – swimming, riflery, archery, horseback riding, skiing – even cleaning, sweeping and bed-making But there are other things we work to teach our campers that perhaps aren’t quite as readily apparent – among them are patience, respect, persistence, kindness – and courage.

Courage is key at camp. In fact, the first principle in the Camp Mac Code is “Live Each Day with Courage”. Our Boys’ Head Counselor, Bill Garner, did his first Vespers on Courage last night. But like so many things at camp, courage isn’t just something we talk about – it’s something we use every day.

It can take a lot of courage for a young camper to slide down a 165 ft. long water slide into a lake. Some campers are scared to ride the Banana Boat at Skiing, others are nervous about riding the mechanical bull in the middle of a big air mattress – a lot of them are scared to ride (or even lead) a horse. But, as Bill told them, “It’s okay to be scared. It’s not okay to let being scared stop you from living life, learning new things – and loving the challenges life brings your way every day.”

Sir Winston Churchill once observed, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” In order to learn that lesson, children have to experience both success and failure – and they have to uncover the courage they might not even realize they have inside them so they can continue to move  past both the successes and the failures we all experience in life.

Psychologists tell us that the “self-esteem movement” has created a generation of self-absorbed young people who truly believe they’re entitled to whatever they want to have whether they’ve worked to earn it or not. (GenerationMe.org)

But self-confidence isn’t the same as self-esteem. When somebody tells you how great you are so often that you finally really believe it, you have developed high self-esteem. (“Congratulations! That’s great! Way to go! You’re the best!” “Yeah, I know I’m great. I must be – they all keep telling me I am. I don’t even have to try.”) But when you do something that you truly didn’t think you could do, you’ve developed self-confidence. And you’re better prepared to tackle life’s next challenge.

Since our unique  Morning Program schedule allows children to participate in our major activities every other day for the whole time they’re at camp, in just our first two mornings at Horseback, every camper in camp came over to the Stables. As we went through these first two days, with the boys Wednesday and the girls today, I watched over 200 campers approach their horses with excitement, nervousness, concern – or even a little fear – and walk away with a big grin and a little swagger after riding a few laps around the ring!

Our Horseback Crew (and especially our horses!) obviously played a big part in that, but ultimately, each camper was alone on top of that horse, and the cowgirls and cowboys who left the barn had every right to walk a little taller on the way out the gate than they might have coming in.

Those young campers didn’t read about courage in a book, hear about it in a story or watch it in a movie – they learned about the courage they already had within themselves when they actually did something they really didn’t know for sure they’d be able to do.

John Wayne once said, “Courage is being scared to death – and saddling up anyway. ”  Here at camp, we saddle up every day.