Dear Therapist:

Our 13-year-old son has never really wanted to go to camp. Every year he asks if he can stay home, and now that summer is approaching, he is asking again.

He has gone the past two years, and although he felt this way beforehand, he ended up liking it once he was there.

Part of us feels he should push himself to go. At the same time, we wonder if camp simply is not a good fit for him. We are also concerned about what staying home would look like socially. Most of his friends spend the summer in camp, and we worry that if he stays home he will be missing out on a big part of what everyone else is doing. We also worry about him not having enough structure during the summer.

How can we tell the difference between if he is just avoiding something that's a bit uncomfortable for him or if he really needs something different? 

Response:

Your son’s feelings about going to camp are not unusual. Many kids are ambivalent about camp—or very much against the idea. For some, it’s about leaving home. For others, it’s about the particular camp. Some kids are anxious about being social on a constant basis for an extended period of time. There are many reasons that feelings about camp can range from uncertainty to strong opposition.

I think that you’re asking the right questions. You’re concerned about your son’s structure and socialization. You worry about his ability to deal with discomfort. And you wonder whether there may be other ways of approaching these aspects of his emotional development.

There’s another question that I would ask: What is it that your son doesn’t like about going to camp? Or, alternatively, what bothers him about leaving home? Is there something about camp that makes him uncomfortable, or is there something about being home that he doesn’t want to lose? The answers to these questions are not necessarily the same—and your son himself may not have a clear understanding of what it is that bothers him about camp.

Kids don’t typically consider the long-term implications of their decisions. That’s one reason parents try to help their children make good choices. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the only consideration should be what appears to make the most sense when focusing solely on a child’s future. Life doesn’t work in a linear fashion. We cannot predict exactly how our decisions will ultimately play out. This is especially true when those decisions are intertwined with a child’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

For instance, you might be convinced that learning to deal with discomfort is more important than your son’s immediate peace of mind. You may believe that helping him avoid discomfort reinforces a problematic pattern. This could lead you to conclude that sending him to camp is the right choice. You might also believe that camp could help him become more comfortable socially.

That may very well be true. Keeping your son in camp could become a positive turning point in how he handles uncomfortable situations. However, this is true only if he ultimately accepts the decision and works through the experience—as he seems to have done in previous years. If, however, he consistently feels forced into a situation not of his choosing, he may begin to feel that his opinion is unimportant and that he has little control over his own life. He may also come to believe that he is not capable of learning from his own experiences and that his parents will always make important decisions for him.

I think your question relates to the larger issue of the degree to which we should control our children’s lives. It’s not our job as parents to somehow determine the perfect answer to every difficult situation. Rather, our job is to guide our children and help them learn to navigate life for themselves.

Because we don’t want our children to be unhappy, we may feel the need to step in and protect them. Because we want them to learn lessons that we learned the hard way, we may want to push them. Because we want them to become independent, we may feel that they should make their own choices. These instincts can pull us in different directions, making it easy to feel stuck.

What these different approaches have in common is our emotional investment in our children. It is important to step back and look at the bigger picture. The goal is not to find the perfect answer. In fact, there usually isn’t one. Our job is to recognize when to push, when to guide, and when to allow our children the autonomy to make their own decisions.

-Yehuda Lieberman, LCSW

  psychotherapist in private practice

  Woodmere, NY

  adjunct professor at Touro University

  Graduate School of Social Work

  author of Self-Esteem: A Primer

  www.ylcsw.com / 516-218-4200

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