A disconnect at camp

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1154728213922&call_pageid=970599119419
http://tinyurl.com/mb4ox

"I usually have to gossip with my best friends, and I just talk with random people for another hour. ... I love my cellphone so much. ... It's my baby."

So you would think there would have been tears, tantrums, perhaps a smuggling incident, when the Grade 9 student was asked to hand over the phone at the gates of Camp Tawingo, which has a strict no-cellphone policy. Not so.

"It frees me," says Goodwill, who will spend three weeks at the Muskoka camp. "Don't get me wrong. Like Toronto is my life by far, but when I come to Tawingo it's a whole different world. You don't care what you look like, you don't have to be anything, you don't have to try, you don't have to worry about gossip and reputation.

"I can't talk to my closest friends, but all of them are at camp, too. They all had to give up their cellphones. I think people sneak their cellphones at Manitou, but you didn't hear that from me."

Overnight camps remain one of the final cell-free frontiers in the lives of tweens and teenagers — for now. Camp directors are meeting resistance, sometimes from parents who can't bear to be out of contact with their offspring. "We're confiscating them all the time," says Ben Lustig, director of Camp Winnebagoe, of cellphones. The Muskoka-area camp has banned them, saying too-frequent calls home foster homesickness. Besides, the summer camp experience is supposed to encourage independence in children.

"If they could be on the phone with mummy and dad every few hours, it's really taking away from the experience," says Lustig. "I think most parents would agree with our policy, but certainly there are some who would love nothing more than to be in constant communication with their kids while at camp."

At Camp Muskoka, executive director Scott Creed says parents have threatened to pull their kids out if they can't keep their cellphones, although none has ever followed through on the threat.

"I would say 75 per cent of parents completely understand" while the remainder either agree begrudgingly or will go so far as to smuggle phones in to their kids, he says. "It's a matter of sort of talking parents off the ledge."

Most camps hand back the cellphones at the end of the summer, but Camp Manitou, also in Muskoka, has started keeping the phones it confiscates. It's written into the contract that parents must sign. The confiscated phones are donated to charity.

"On the first day when we ask kids to give them up, we usually get five or 10, but there's usually another 10 out there that we end up having to take and not give back," says co-owner Mark Diamond.

It's a long way from Walden Pond, but then not all summer camps are what they used to be. Campers still retreat to the wilds each summer for the typical activities: Swimming and canoeing and beading necklaces, but they can also sign up for a four-week course in how to be a CEO.

So it should come as no surprise that when it comes to other personal electronic devices: iPods, MP3-players, Discmans, DVD players and video games, camps are all over the map. Some ban all personal electronic devices, but even at Ak-o-Mak, a sports-wilderness facility for girls in the Almaguin Highlands, 300 kilometres north of Toronto, campers are permitted to bring iPods and MP3-players, because many of them are joggers who like to listen to music when they run, says director Jane Lawrence.

Although Camp Winnebagoe bans cellphones, campers are allowed to listen to their iPods and play their DVDs and video games in their cabins during free time.

"In this business, you have to pick your battles, and there are just some issues that are just not, frankly, all that critical to our operation," says Lustig.

Others disagree with the idea of personal electronic devices at summer camp, saying they interfere with socialization — another hallmark of the summer camp experience.

Tia Pearse, who owns Camp Tawingo with her husband, sent her 9-year-old son to a camp in Quebec this summer, and although he had a good time, she was disappointed to learn the camp had a movie night.

"Kids go home and remember the trip where they camped out for two nights and took their own food, they don't remember: "Oh yeah, and then we watched Ferris Bueller," says Pearse, who also represents the Ontario Camping Association's public awareness committee.

Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, is opposed to the idea of cellphones at summer camp, but feels that when they are found in the possession of campers, they shouldn't be removed in a punitive way. It needs to be explained to campers that the alternative — fully experiencing nature — is worth giving up a cellphone for.

He says parents also need to examine their own behaviour, and ask themselves whether they are too reliant on technology. Louv recently took his 18-year-old son on a fishing trip to Alaska. They left behind their personal electronic devices, including Louv's laptop.

"It was as much withdrawal for me as it was for him. I'm used to working all the time, to being online all the time," said Louv.

Fishing in a stream one day, they were rushed by a bear that popped out from behind a distant ridge.

Says Louv: "Nothing concentrates the attention more than a bear. An iPod just doesn't compare."

Although Camp Winnebagoe bans cellphones, campers are allowed to listen to their iPods and play their DVDs and video games in their cabins during free time.

If iPods, dvds, and video games are ok, then why are cellphones so evil they aren't even given back at the end of summer? If that camp is so wishy-washy over this, I question what other wacky rules they have and wouldn't send my child there.

2 posted on 08/07/2006 6:59:50 AM PDT by mtbopfuyn (I think the border is kind of an artificial barrier - San Antonio councilwoman Patti Radle)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.