Every February camp directors from across the country gather for the American Camp Association national conference. It’s a time dedicated to professional development, networking, seeing old friends, and reliving good memories. This is the type of conference that’s actually fun to attend, and a large part of that fun is in the quality educational and professional development offerings.
These offerings always include helpful things like sessions on implementing new programs, trends in society and in the camping industry, and further training for topics as wide-ranging as leave-no-trace nature programs to changing norms in child and youth development. Usually when I attend this conference I come away with fresh ideas for programming, policy updates, and some new directions for research.
As I’ve matured in my career I’ve come to see that other camps don’t always do things the way we do them at Tate’s, nor do they all have the same quality in their leadership. Our program director team has some of the finest professionals in the camping industry. Coming away from this conference, talking with other professionals, and seeing what other camps are asking questions about has convinced me of the profound quality, professionalism, and creativity present within the folks we’ve hired to lead and train others. It’s always nice to see that we’re current, and that we maintain high performance!
Additionally, for the first time I was thrilled to have the opportunity to represent Tate’s Day Camp, not just as an attendee, but as a professional development session presenter. Sharing good information is always fun, but it was especially fun to do so with other camp professionals who would take the information back to their programs and use it to make lives better.
I was grateful to share knowledge about the Five Costly Mistakes that many leadership teams make, and ways to address them, and also how social media is affecting our children – to the point that they are more connected than they’ve ever been, but also self-reporting that they’re more lonely than they’ve ever been. These are the issues that we think through as summer camp professionals, and the questions that we seek to answer.
Our children need us to think through these things and provide them with opportunities to be kids. We are helping them to have fun, to learn the social skills that seemingly continue to fall by the wayside, and to take positive risks.
If this conference has convinced me of anything, it’s that in our society we are slowly forgetting how to let children be children. Yes, they need protection and guidance, but they also need to make decisions; to be wrong and be told they’re wrong; to fail intelligently; to learn the difference between things that are merely emotionally uncomfortable and things that are legitimately emotionally unsafe; and so much more. This conference has reminded me that our program must continue to be one where children can be children; where they can grow and learn as they were meant to. It was a great conference.