On Twitter (forgive me!) I asked if anyone who’d been a camper back in the day wished their parents had had photos of them sent home daily, as so many overnight camps do now.
The “NO!” vote was 93%. Small sample, but still…
Then came this fascinating tweet:
Lenore, I speak as an older parent of younger kids. In addition, I AM that “modern” camp. With over 1200 campers on-site at any given time, I oversee a team of 15 camp photographers who upload almost 1500 photos daily. And it’s never enough. The parents are RAVENOUS for more and more and more. Some parents, if they haven’t seen a photo of their child in a couple of days, begin to stress out, imagining the worse. They call and beg and plead. Meanwhile, the camper is just chugging along, having a great time, phone-free, being a kid in the best possible way. There’s a deeper thread here, a thread of anxiousness and fear and a lack of trust. And it’s not healthy for either the parent or the kid.
What a culture we live in!
I am so interested in the way a stream of info, rather than calming anyone, seems to give them OCD: The more reassurance they have, the more they need, and the more one minute WITHOUT reassurance becomes unbearable. Think about a guy who keeps going back to check if he locked the door. Checking calms him for a moment. But NOT checking — learning to live WITHOUT constant checking — is the only way to break the cycle of anxiety.
Phones, photos, tracking, portals — all of these FEED the anxiety while PRETENDING to assuage it. It’s like giving someone a burger than makes them more hungry after they eat it. “Oh, you want more? Let me sell you another one!”
Love to hear anyone’s thoughts on how the need for certainty — concrete reassurance — is changing childhood, parenting, the camp world and the world-world! Thanks!
Here’s (not) looking at you, kids! — L.
4 Comments
“Oh, you want more? Let me sell you another one!”
This is a feature, not a bug!
I have all of my parents’ old photograph albums, and drug store envelopes of old photographs that never made it into albums. In all of that vast collection, there are probably not more than about three dozen or so photographs of me from my entire childhood. The same goes for photos of my younger brother. This was fairly normal. I remember being astonished, in the 1980s and ’90s, when my sister-in-law kept a camera loaded with film always handy to photodocument each and every day of her kids’ lives.
Oh, this starts well before sleep away camp! It starts with the constant stream of information from Oura rings (to track temps) and OPKs and other conception aids, graduates to betas to check hCG progression, super early ultrasounds (so early that there’s nothing to see, and then THAT anxiety spiral), OB offices with Dopplers and their own ultrasound machines… If there’s no feedback, is someone actually pregnant?
The constant push for more info, more reassurance, more monitoring, more testing — MORE ANXIETY. It’s insidious and I don’t even know how we’d start to dial it back
This was helpful because it treats old photos as records, not just images. I usually suggest keeping one untouched archive copy and one edited sharing copy so family members can see what changed later. Do you prefer adding names and dates in filenames, metadata, or a separate notes file?