by Laxmi Sivaram
For a child between three and twelve years of age in
The Bangalore Times seemed heavier than usual when I picked it up. As I brought it inside the house I saw a bunch of colourful leaflets of different sizes falling from it and sprawling across my living room floor. There were nearly ten of them. I usually get one or two almost every day and simply toss them into the trash without a second glance. But today, since there were so many, I decided to take a moment to see what they were about.
Bangalore mornings are beginning to get hotter by the day, I thought as I sat down in my balcony and began sifting through them. The first one was for a summer camp that offered ten days of storytelling and poetry from Victorian classics. Interesting, I thought, but may be a tad too abstract for eight- to ten-year-olds. Another one offered a workshop on critical reading and comprehension and story writing. The rest of them were for art and craft workshops, sessions on life skills, adventure, visual math, Vedic math and a plethora of other impressive activities.
Growing up in the ‘80s in a tiny Pune suburb, I had not heard of ‘summer camps’. As school kids, ‘summer’ meant ‘summer holidays’ – a time to righteously put our books away and redeem lost play time. It marked the beginning of a much-awaited respite after the nerve-wracking final exams. We would spend the next couple of days animatedly discussing each exam, going through the question paper over and over again, onerously trying to assess the kind of marks we could anticipate, all the while oscillating between twinges of the remorse of not having studied harder and quivers of the relief that it was over for now.
As the anxieties and agitations of exam results dwindled, we went back to what we were best at doing: laughing and playing with an abandon that did not acknowledge even the primal needs of hunger or thirst. What did we play? Well, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that once we were done with all the games we knew, we invented new ones. I remember how we once chanced upon a discarded ball of wool. We carefully wrapped some cloth over it and bound it tightly until it became a scruffy little ball. We spent the rest of the afternoon formulating and playing an assortment of ‘wool-ball’ games. It ended up with all of us staking claim over that wad of rags, fighting over who would get to keep this prized discovery in their house.
I don’t remember who got to keep it, but I remember that even after playing with it for hours its novelty had not worn off. I remember us shouting at each other, fighting over it and crying, without getting our parents to arbitrate. I also remember reaching a consensus relying on the only resources we had – boundless energy and our innate ability to problem solve. There were times when not all of us were satisfied with the outcome, but we learned to accommodate irregularities and reconcile differences without even considering the possibility of parental intervention.
These days, outdoor free-play has been largely replaced by tablets, video games and smartphones. However, despite the increase in the variety of choices, children are easily disinterested and bored, perhaps instinctively knowing that their parents are ready and waiting to rescue them from their monotony – an idea of parenting that, for various reasons, has taken root. I wonder if as parents we pause to think how our unwillingness to let go is impeding the process of self- learning for the children. At the smallest indication of free time for the kids, we barge in to take charge and organise it for them. The very thought of our kids sitting idle makes us paranoid enough to start foraging for ways to optimise their free time. To add to it, the availability of abundant options combined with our affordability, obliquely coerces us into believing that it is unreasonable for us to not make legitimate use of them.
From the way I see it, it is probably this obsession of parents to resolutely ‘fix’ things for their children, their tenacity in finding ways to keep them constantly and constructively preoccupied, that has led to the propagation of the now ubiquitous summer camp.
Now, I am not insinuating that summer camps are harmful; in fact, I do believe that some of them are a good alternative to kids’ tendencies to spend hours on phones or laptops. They can also be especially useful for working parents who struggle to make arrangements for the children to be taken care of once the school closes for vacations.
Children, too, may not question their parents on why they are being sent for a summer camp, as they may think of it as an organic transition from school. In either case, they do not want to be left out given the popularity of these camps. Parents for their part perhaps inadvertently take their child’s compliance for granted or do not want to be ‘guilty’ of depriving their children of something that is so easily available and affordable. The social as well as academic environment today is also quite different from what it used to be back then. For instance, these days we have schools which insist on children enrolling into a summer camp run by them, leaving little room for parents to speculate about its advantages.
Amidst these considerations, I am uncertain if the purpose behind enrolling children into a camp has been fully and objectively reviewed by parents or they are perfunctorily viewing these camps as a panacea to keep children from idling away their time during the holidays. Therefore, I wonder if the time spent in finding the ‘perfect’ summer camp for our kids really translates into an enjoyable holiday for them.
In trying to do what is best for our children by keeping them ‘productively’ engaged, I fear that we are becoming fixated with finding solutions for them. I believe such an approach effectively robs them of a chance to perceive the world without conditions and filters; to use their intuition and imagination comprehensively; to understand their environment and produce their own preferences, judgments and values; to use their spontaneity and skill to consolidate their time and shape their world as they evolve into adults.
This makes me think: what would happen if we accepted the likelihood of our children being idle and bored? Can we take a moment off our preoccupation with directive education and play, and instead provide them the opportunity to experience boredom and contend with it? Can we trust that they are capable of coming up with their own versions of antidotes?
What would happen if we simply left it to them to discover their idea of a summer vacation? Can we trust that they will expend their creativity to observe, discern and innovate?
Can we hold ourselves back from gate-crashing into their ingenuity and instead watch them expand their latitudes with unrestrained curiosity, unbridled exploration, unorganised play, uninhibited expression and unfettered dreams?
Then, can we trust that they will learn to figure things out?
Laxmi Sivaram is a freelance Corporate Trainer and an aspiring Psychotherapist. She is deeply interested in people, behaviour and inter-personal dynamics. She is fascinated by children and intrigued by the way they relate to the world. The eternal optimist, she believes in learning and evolving as a person with each day.
Hi Laxmi, what an introspective article ! Really so called ‘modern parents’ should think about it.. merely by providing a. quick fix to our children would help ? Would it not restrain their curiosity? A food for thought indeed..