To continue the campground theme, even tangentially, I was listening to a piece on NPR yesterday about sleep away camps. Apparently the rise of the internet has led to some interesting changes in the traditional camp experience.

The days of parents only knowing what is happening via hastily scrawled notes back home are disappearing. Many camps offer secure sites to parents where they will upload pictures of the children throughout the day, every day. One interviewee said that parents enjoyed seeing their children and feeling part of their child's time at camp. However, the comment was made the some parents are using this to micromanage. It has led to communications from the parents to the camp on things as small as "I saw a scratch on Liza's arm; what happened?" or "Owen was wearing the same shirt two days in a row!" One camp leader indicated that there is a rise of separation anxiety, not on the part of the kids, but rather on the part of the parents. In this age of digital and cellular communications (it seemed that most camps also ban cell phones), parents are accustomed to being able to contact their children anytime, anywhere. When they are completely out of touch with their children during camp times, it is difficult for some.

It was interesting food for thought. Statistics show that the world around us is no more dangerous than when we were kids, but the perception of many people is completely different. Luis and I have been talking about this since the new year. How much independence should we give to our children and when? Granted I was a responsible and level headed child, but at age 10, I was biking 4.5 miles in the country during the summer to get myself to band practice. We struggle with whether or not to let Abigail (age 9) walk 4 blocks to art class by herself or stay at softball practice alone and walk home afterwards. We have given her a two block range and let her go to the library or run small errands alone, but how do we expand that freedom while feeling comfortable?

I can understand now why some parents are giving cell phones to their upper elementary school children, even though I may not agree with it. The idea that even if our kids are away from us, tasting that independence, we can still contact them to make sure they are safe is tantalizing. It truly does nothing to make our children more safe, but it gives us the parents the illusion of control. When we first starting letting Abigail wander farther from home, we would send her with the two way radio. It felt wrong to me to use the radios around home like that for some reason, and I soon stopped. {We do use them when camping or at festivals without compunction though} I speculate that part of the growing process for our children involves our learning as parents to let go of control. Perhaps we need to learn to hand that control over to our children in order for them to learn to manage independence responsibly.