Why Summer Camp Isn't as Safe as You Think (on The Huffington Post Parents)

It was a hot Monday morning in July and he was dribbling a soccer ball when it happened. Twelve-year-old Joshua Thibodeau was at a soccer camp last month when he suddenly collapsed. Within 45 minutes, he was dead. By all accounts Joshua Thibodeau's death was a tragic accident. Yes, it was hot, but he had just had a water break. Yes, the three coaches working at the camp, including one EMT, followed proper procedures. And, yes, little Joshua had undergone a medical exam within the past year clearing him to play soccer. With the autopsy results still pending it's useless to speculate on his cause of death (Sudden cardiac death syndrome? Dehydration? Seizure?). But it's useful to reflect on what parents can learn from this tragedy, especially as the fall sports season gears up.

Summer camps started in the United States in the 1880s, mainly for affluent boys. By the 1930s niche camps developed for girls, religious groups, and immigrants. These sleepaway and day camps focused on outdoor activities and a range of group activities and competition, like Color Wars.

While traditional summer camps still exist, in the twenty-first century it is specialty camps that have proliferated. Specialty camps focus on a specific activity -- like the soccer camp where Josh Thibodeau was playing. Middle- and upper-middle class parents opt to use the summer months to help their children develop concrete skills and credentials that will help them throughout the next year, and in the years leading up to the college admissions race.

Top-notch camp counselors are sought out for these specialty camps so that "the best" can teach kids how to be "the best." But just who are these camp counselors, and how qualified are they to be working with young kids? Unlike teachers, camp counselors are neither required to be certified to work with young children nor to be treated as experts in a given subject area (like soccer, tennis, dance, chess, etc.).

Click HERE to keep reading on The Huffington Post Parents!

The Mutton Busting Circuit for Kids

General George Patton often declared in his speeches to troops during World War II, “When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time.” Now, if you like to ride sheep, aspire to be a bull rider, and are at least three-years-old, I have a new sport for you to play to win: Mutton busting.  This week The New York Times ran an article on the kids’ mutton busting circuit in Colorado. Kids, aged three to six, compete to see who can stay on the back of a lamb for the longest amount of time.  As with so many other kids’ activities that used to take place without any adult supervision, mutton busting has, “begun to move from horseplay, and the occasional rodeo halftime show, to wider, sometimes suburban, audiences and competitors, toward becoming a codified sport with its own gear and championships.”

This is what mutton busting looks like in action:

(I can’t help but comment on this little girl’s fabulous pink cowboy boots. She clearly knows how to blend a competitive streak with a flair of femininity.)

In contemporary American society everything does seem to be competitive.  Organized, tournament-like competitions are held for the seemingly mundane, the inane, and the arcane.  We have competitive eating contests, beauty pageants, bodybuilding competitions, spelling bees, video game tournaments, and the list goes on—not to mention any competitive sporting event you can imagine, from soccer on inline skates to childhood games like dodgeball.  Unlike the rest of the world we have more games than practices when it comes to athletic events because Americans tend to place a higher value on competitions than on practices.  And all these competitive trends are magnified in childhood.

Why? In my work I draw a connection between the way college admissions works in this country (it’s not purely based on numerical assessments like test scores and GPA—taking into account activities and leadership as well).  This system rewards what I call “competitive kid capital,” which kid acquire through participation in competitive afterschool activities.  I also argue that the development of formal, organized for-profit competitions, run by adults who make their living off of kids and competition, has helped solidify this system.

In short, it doesn’t surprise me that there is now a circuit for mutton busting. What will they think of next? And, what do you think about this trend?

Age Cut-offs, Limits, and Manipulations

NOTE: A version of this piece was syndicated on BlogHer! Check it out by clicking HERE. This past weekend I enjoyed watching the kick-off to the US women's gymnastics season at the Covergirl Classic, which featured the "comebacks" of Shawn Johnson and Chelsie Memmel, the continued dominance of Alicia Sacramone, and the debut of several new stars.  Of course the veterans "coming back" are around 23-years-old, and the newcomers are 15.  I also watched the first night of the FINA World Championships on Sunday as the US women took silver in the 4x100m free relay.  There, again, a 16-year-old "newcomer" (Missy Franklin) performed well, alongside a 28-year-old "veteran" (Natalie Coughlin).

These newcomers and veterans are preparing for the London Olympics, now a little more than a year away. Age always makes a good story in sports coverage (recall from the 2008 Games, for example, the prodigies, like Shawn Johnson, and the elder states[wo]men, like Dara Torres).  But age is also often the source of controversy. For example, did the Chinese lie about the ages of their gymnasts to give them a physical advantage? We know they did in 2000, as did the North Koreans in 2004.  You only have to look at pictures (like the one I included below) of the more womanly eighteen-year-old Nastia Liukin next to the sprite-like sixteen-year-old He Kexin to wonder if Kexin might actually be fourteen instead (you must be 16 during an Olympic year to compete in women's artistic gymnastics).

Lest you think that age cut-offs, limits, and controversies are limited to elite levels of sport, look no further than your local soccer field or Little League diamond. Parents often lie about the age of their children to try to give them a competitive advantage.  Perhaps the most notorious case of a parent lying about the age of a child was not in activities I concentrate on in my research (like chess, dance, soccer, and child beauty pageants), but in Little League baseball.  In 2001, during the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Danny Almonte’s father and coach forged the boy’s identification papers, saying he was twelve.  Danny was actually fourteen and hence ineligible to play Little League.  After he pitched a no-hitter and lead his team to a third place finish, the deception was discovered and the team’s placement was stripped.

Other cases are less extreme, but do occur, and in a range of activities.  In her work on girls’ softball Jennifer Ring says that savvy parents try to conceive to best complement their children’s sports “careers,” so a child will be older in their birth year. Other parents, like Almonte’s, simply tamper with birth certificates to give them an edge.  This happened on the New England child beauty pageant circuit where I did research.  A mother lied to multiple pageant directors, saying her daughter was three, but she was actually five.  Being younger allowed her to qualify for, and to win, the "0-3 Grand Supreme" titles.

Giving children an edge in terms of age has the biggest effect in athletics-- what is known as the “relative-age effect."  But it also happens when it comes to academics as well.  In a practice known as “academic red-shirting,” parents of many children, especially boys, are held back from entering kindergarten; a handful of my chess boys were red-shirted in preschool or pre-kindergarten.  As with sports, some parents will report “timing the conception of their children with [academic] redshirting in mind”.  Notably, redshirting basically did not exist fifty years ago.  This process would not exist today if there were not competitive consequences in being “behind” in the competitive hierarchy.  This is additional evidence that there are now structures in place to help put kids in the best position to feed into a system of competitive positioning that is happening earlier and earlier in children’s lives.

Sometimes parents don't cheat per se—but they certainly game the system.  Many of the parents and teachers I met had learned to manipulate competitive activity systems in order to maximize the chance of winning. For instance, some dance routines have younger children added to bring down the average age of the group (you hear talk of group ages on Lifetime's Dance Moms).  Parents’ willingness to game the system across activities shows that they are often more concerned with their children winning, even in a manipulated system, than getting a fair outcome.  The focus is often on winning at any cost, which is a lesson passed on to the children.

ETA: The New York Times ran a story on July 30, five days after I published this post, on the Ugandan Little League team. The team members were denied visas to enter the United States on the grounds that, "some of the visa applications included birth records that 'several parents admitted had been altered to make some players appear younger than they actually are.'” I am sure that this was a combination of poor records (note the last line of the article, "'A kid may not know his birthday,' Stanley said. 'They don’t have cake and ice cream.'”) and parents hoping that their kids could get to the US and perhaps a better way of life. Nonetheless it's not right to lie about a child's age or to expect younger kids to compete against older kids no matter the circumstances. That said, it seems like parents/authorizes are most likely to LIE about children's ages when they come from poorer countries or repressive regimes (Uganda, Dominican Republic, China, for example); whereas more affluent parents, like those in the US, are more likely to manipulate their children's ages to give them the best advantages within a particular system.

Is your child's summer camp counselor qualified?

UPDATE: While I believe these issues are always relevant, hearing of the death of 12-year-old Joshua Thibodeau at a soccer camp in Holden, MA this week really made it real. While it appears his death was a terrible tragedy that could not have been prevented-- and that the soccer camp staff did everything correctly-- it is a reminder that worrying about safe conditions (especially during a summer heat wave) is not silly. Earlier this month The New York Times ran an interesting article on the changing economics of summer sleep-away camps. My favorite line from the piece was: "'It is not enough anymore to just go to camp to have fun and make friends and improve independence and self-esteem,' Mr. Black says. 'Some parents want actual takeaways. They want to see skills, achievements, patches and certificates.'"  The desire for credentials and accolades in childhood is definitely heightened nowadays and because of this specialized camps and counselors are sought so that "the best" can teach kids how to be "the best." But just who are these camp counselors, and how credentialed are they to be awarding credentials to young kids?

The ease with which someone can claim to be a coach or teacher became clear to me when I attended a week-long soccer camp during fieldwork for my dissertation (and book), Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture.  I met the owner of the “Northeastern States Soccer Camp” (name has been changed) at a State Soccer Expo I attended the previous winter.  Whenever I walked by his booth he tried to get me to take one of his brochures to send my child to his camp.  Finally, not wanting to be rude, I explained that I was not interested in sending my child because I did not have any children and that I was attending the Expo doing research.  Being a graduate of one of my alma maters, he offered to help by inviting me to attend one of the camps to see how a sleep-away summer soccer camp is run.

Over the next few months we spoke several times and he asked if I would consider being a coach.  I clearly explained on multiple occasions that I had no soccer skills but that I could be a counselor, living with the kids in their dorm and supervising them.  When I arrived at the camp I discovered that I was supposed to be in charge of training a group of participants—whose parents paid nearly $700 for the week under the impression that their children would receive top-of-the-line coaching and training.  I immediately protested and again volunteered to help in other ways, like doing registration and working in the camp store.

The camp that week was understaffed when it came to coaching so the director tried to convince me to run drills.  Again I said I had no knowledge to run those drills or give corrections.  The director was frustrated with my unwillingness to serve as a “coach.” After two days of feeling deeply uncomfortable I decided to leave the camp.  The experience showed me how easy it is for someone to pass themselves off as a coach, even in a reputable program, when they actually have no substantive knowledge of the focal activity.

It is shockingly easy for individuals to go into business and exploit families in the world of competitive children’s activities simply by applying a veneer of professionalism. Parents invest a great deal of money in their children’s participation, and many teachers and coaches and other entrepreneurs are there with their hands out, ready to accept whatever people can give, often asking for more.  Legal scholars, like Laura Rosenbury, have written about how unregulated the space between school and family life is, and competitive children’s activities-- and summer camps-- certainly occupy this space.  I've previously written about what to look for when signing your children up for afterschool activities, and the same rules apply here: expertise, teaching, and safety. Be sure to check on the credentials of your child's camp counselor before signing on the dotted line.

Celebrity Children

Chris Bosh of the Miami Heat just lost the NBA Championships. But he's okay with it. Why? Because his daughter, Trinity, got to see him play in the Finals.

Now Trinity is two-years-old. But imagine instead that she was twelve-years-old. How hard would it be to watch your father-- or any parent-- lose a major game or tournament, in person?

This past weekend Bernard Lagat, an Olympic runner, competed in the 2011 Adidas Grand Prix in New York City. Lagat ran the 5000m and came in second. His five-and-a-half-year-old son, Miika was in the stands to watch. How do I know? Because in NBC's coverage they actually miked little Miika and recorded his reaction to the race, showing the visual during the race replays. Miika was screaming for his dad to win, and seemed upset when he came in second. He sat next to his mom during the race, and obviously his parents had to okay their son being miked and recorded. While Miika is adorable and full of personality, was this really the best decision? Clearly a lot of Miika's identity is wrapped up in being the son of a successful runner. What about his own identity?

It's not just the children of athletes who often have a spotlight on themselves based on their parents performances. This can apply to children of performers and politicians, along with notorious figures. For example, Karen Gravano, the daughter of Sammy the Bull, is in the news as part of the VH1 show Mob Wives. Gravano is currently penning a memoir about growing up the daughter of a mobster.  And then there's Chaz Bono, also much in the news, who has used the celebrity of his parents as a platform to promote transgender awareness (never mind that as a young girl Chasity was featured on her parents' television show in sequins and make-up, which made his personal struggles more public and in some ways more difficult).

Perhaps most interesting to me are the children of politicians.  Politicians regularly use their families, and their children, to promote a particular image to the public.  They also use their children to drive home particular issues. For example, the Obamas (especially Michelle) talk about childhood obesity in terms of their own children's "rising BMIs." These same children can become caught in the crossfire when things go awry. When the Arnold and Maria scandal broke, their teenage son's tweets were reported by the media. And then, of course, there are the Palin children. The Palin brood have been used in and across multiple reality television shows (for some of my thoughts on kids and reality TV in general you can read my USA Today op-ed here). When Sarah Palin took off on a summer tour recently her youngest daughter, Piper, was used in the video produced by SarahPAC.

It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Putin shows that there is another path-- although in this country we'd likely prefer something less extreme than essentially hiding family members.  But this raises larger questions: should access to children of celebrities be limited in particular ways? Is the media wrong to focus attention on some of them (like Lagat's son being miked and recorded)? Or is this solely a family/parental decision that we should leave up to the parent's discretion?

It's true that children of celebrities get various benefits from having celebrity parents, like access to other celebrities and real material rewards.  It is also easier for them to have a platform, if they so chose, as Chaz Bono shows. But, in general, they are thrust into the spotlight against their will and based on the skills and accomplishments of their parents, and not their own. In some ways, then, are these parents no better than Richard Heene, Balloon Boy's father?