Staff Up

Last month, my wife and I convinced our teenage daughters to give up TikTok for a week. They agreed and the change we saw in their behavior was almost immediate. Suddenly, family dinner stretched on with longer conversations, slower eating, and more enjoyment of each other. Sometimes those dinners led to card games which led to kitchen clean-up and more silly conversation. It was awesome.

Along the way, the girls discovered they really weren’t missing out on any interactions with their friends. When they went to school, their friends would catch them up on whatever “happened” the night before. The girls quickly realized that what “happened” on TikTok the night before was meaningless, time-wasting stuff—unlike what they did in the real world.

The same metamorphous happens each summer at camp. Cell phones are put away for the week or month and campers re-learn how to navigate the real world. I know how quickly the change takes place and I know it’s interesting to see what social skills they have and, more interesting, at least to me, what social skills they’re missing.

Of all the wonderful things camp provides, the no-cell-phone policy might be one of the best.

This month, we tackle staff training. One of those training items is alerting staff to the social skills they may need to teach their young campers in the coming weeks and months. Dr. Chris Thurber covers this in depth in his article starting on page XXX.

The issue is chock full of other great staff-training ideas and a few surprises. All in all, I loved how it turned out. I hope you do, too.

Have a great month!

Till next month…

Rodney J. Auth

Publisher

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