meatb0lls
2 Years Experience
Toronto, ON
Male, 27
I worked for 2 years as an overnight camp counselor in the Muskoka Lakes region, a few hours north of Toronto, Canada. Each year, I supervised a cabin of boys between 11-13 years old. I had also been a camper there for seven years, which were formative, to say the least.
That's a great question. Myself? No...but that's probably a function of my own habit of keeping an emotional distance, but that's an issue better left for my shrink than Jobstr:) But it's not at all unusual for counselors to form friendships with their campers that last well into adulthood. That's especially true when a counselor is placed with the same group of kids summer after summer, in which case s/he literally watches these kids grow up, which undoubtedly leads to stronger bonds. I, on the other hand, was only on staff for 2 years and got a different cabin of kids each time. The last day of camp was always a sad one - many hugs and tears. But I always thoughts that that was driven more by the fact that the kids new school was just around the corner than it was because they were actually sorry to leave their counselors. I'm Facebook friends with a few of my former campers now, and it's funny seeing them as, well, adults, when I last saw them over a decade ago as 11-year olds. Thanks for the question:)
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Yeah, one of my two years I had one of the absolute terrors. We knew the bad kids, because they’d come back year after year and every counselor would pray they didn’t get stuck with one. The worst kids are those who would go out of their way to sabotage other kids’ camp experiences. You can deal with a kid if he’s just a little a-hole who likes to talk back because all you really need to do is ignore him – sounds simple, but it worked. But some of these little monsters would go out of their way to test you at every turn by ruining everyone’s day: intentionally spilling food at the lunch table, refusing to put on a life jacket in the sail boat so you couldn’t leave the dock, that kind of stuff. You could “ground” them by making them stay in the cabin during the more fun night-time activities, but in a perverse sense, that just gave them the sense of significance they were looking for all along. If a kid was bad enough, he could either get sent home during the middle of the summer, but more frequently he just wouldn’t be allowed back to camp the following year.
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Some campers would get kicked out every year for theft. Any alcohol or drug use would typically get you booted, too. But first-offender campers usually just got sent home for 3 to 7 days as punishment…and were on probation if they came back. I’m pretty sure any of those offenses would get a counselor fired…as would, I’m sure, any inappropriate behavior with the kids. If you were irresponsible enough with your kids, I’m sure you could get fired for that too, but I don’t remember that happening more than once. All in all, it was pretty rare for staff to get the boot.
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I think most of my campers loved it, but I understand that there are people who just aren’t built for sleepaway camp. It takes a certain amount of independence and social wherewithal to be away from home for 2 months. Even the nerdier kids who got picked on would come back year after year, and seemed sad when camp was over. Most of my kids were 12 to 13 and had been at camp for 3-4 years, having started when they were 8 or 9…so it’s kind of self-selective: most of the camp-haters had been weeded out. And frankly sometimes it's just the luck of the draw as to whether you get along with the kids you get put in a cabin with. I knew a guy in high school who EVERYBODY liked; popular, good at sports, socially adept. And yet he said that the summer he spent at sleepaway camp was the worst of his life and that no one liked him. Which, knowing this guy, seems impossible because he was just genuinely good all-around dude...and yet for whatever reason he just didn't mesh with the cabin of 10 kids he got placed in. Bad luck, I guess.
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It's a little weird, because you have plenty of friends who are a year or two younger and all of a sudden you come back to camp one year and you're a counselor, but they're still paying campers. But that's mitigated somewhat because they never give 1st-year counselors a cabin of older campers (probably because it would be hard for a 17-year old junior counselor to command any sort of authority from a cabin of 15-year olds.) My first year as a counselor I had a cabin of 12 year olds, and my second year I had a cabin of 11-year olds and it's funny to look back on it because they basically look up to you like you're some sort of "adult"...when you're really just some irresponsible teenager who's been charged with making sure other people's kids don't die. It's kind of insane, actually, now that I think about it. The hardest part of it was remembering that you (ostensibly) weren't there to have fun yourself, but to ensure that a good time is had by your cabin of kids. And you're taking them zip-lining and waterskiing, and you want nothing more than to shove them all out of the way so that you can go first...but that would probably be frowned upon. So you learn some discipline in that regard.
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That’s an interesting question – it was interesting to observe the social dynamics of pre-teens from the counselor’s perspective. What I always found fascinating was that there were some nerdier kids who simply kept to themselves, and they were largely left alone by the more popular kids. Conversely, there’d always be some socially awkward kid who “tried a little too hard” to emulate the cool kids and ended up bearing the brunt of their ridicule. Even young boys have a built-in “authenticity” meter; they can see right through a kid who’s pretending to be something he’s not.
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Well, first thing I'll say is that I never saw it nor heard of anything like that happening at my camp. Keep in mind, of course, that most staff (>90%) were former campers whom the camp directors knew well enough from their time as campers to invite them to be staff members when the time came...so that in and of itself would probably filter out a lot of people who had exhibited suspicious behavioral traits. That being said, obviously sexual abuse happens in all environments, often perpetrated by people who no one would ever have suspected...and sleepaway camp is probably an environment that's rife for such activity. That being said, in my 7 years I never heard of anything like that (not even rumors) at my camp, nor any of the surrounding ones. (Disclaimer: send your kid to The Second Mile and all bets are off.)
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In a heartbeat. I don’t see any way my kids aren’t going to go to camp. I won’t insist they go back year after year if they hate it, but – at least in the Muskoka region – it’s something of a rite of passage.
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The worst that ever happened in my cabins was that the nerdier kids would get made fun of. Sometimes kids would steal from each other or pull pranks on each other while they slept: drawing on each other or the shaving cream + nose tickle prank. If you wanted to see real cruelty, of course, all you had to do was head over to the girl’s cabins: 11-13-year-old boys aren’t all that creative nor subtle when it comes to harassment: there’d be some name-calling, and at worst some pushing and shoving. Preteen girls, on the other hand, could get downright vicious. They’d steal from each other, and plan elaborate pranks to embarrass their nemeses at socially inopportune times. I heard about one girl taking a digital picture of her nemesis changing, waiting until camp was over, and then emailing it to all of the other girls’ friends. Digital technology + close living quarters + immaturity does not a pretty picture paint.
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I know from my time as a camper that it wasn’t unusual for the older campers / CITs to bring weed or “water” bottles filled with vodka, but I never saw any of my campers doing any of that stuff. 13 years old was probably a little early for them to be getting into that anyway. One of my 12-year old kids did, however, get caught smoking…he only got a stern talking to, but the older camper who gave him the cigarettes got disciplined by being sent home for a week or something.
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It was actually pretty outlandish: around $4,000 for a 2-month session when I was there, but I’ve heard it’s ballooned to nearly twice that since. Keep in mind that many of the camps in the Muskoka region, including mine, cater to relatively affluent families, so despite the insane fee, they had a waitlist hundreds of kids long.
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The pay is pretty terrible until you’ve worked there several years. I think I got roughly $300 and $700 for my first two years, respectively. After that, it starts to get respectable, with senior staff and section heads earning $3,000 and up. Of course counselors, unlike campers, also aren’t paying for accommodations and food, so I guess you can factor that into the “pay”.
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Oh, I get it all right:)
Buffalooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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Er…yes. Most counselors and staff (distinction: “counselors” looked after a specific cabin of kids / “staff” worked at the various activities like tennis, sailing, etc., but also slept in a cabin with campers) were between 16 and 22 years old, practically zero adult presence, and plenty of dark nooks to slip away to. A perfect recipe for all sorts of bad decision-making. Think college with fewer responsibilities.
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I never got offered a tip after the summer, nor did any other counselor I know of...whether that just wasn't the practice at MY camp or what, I'm not sure, but it just didn't happen. However on VISITOR'S DAY, which was about half way through the 2-month summer term, visiting parents would occasionally -- not often, but sometimes -- offer counselors a tip (bribe?) to look out for their kid for the remaining month, or something, But camp management always gave us a briefing before visitor's day instructing us that if offered a tip, we were to politely decline, but offer to "take extra special care of that young lady [or lad] for nothing." I never had to face that dilemma myself.
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Good God, no. Well, actually let me be a little more responsible: you may want to check with the particular camp you're looking into before indulging in whatever you've got in mind, but none of the summer camps in the region where I worked tested for drugs...let's just say if they had, the staff headcount would have been quite a bit lower.
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That's not a horrible question, it's a good one...but I have to give the lame answer of "it depends"...because I don't know where you're planning on working. At my overnight camp, there was a designated room in a building where staff could go to smoke. I think the idea was partly to keep it confined to one area, and partly so that the kids wouldn't see it happening...but it wasn't much of a secret when they'd go back to their cabin smelling like an ashtray. The kids obviously knew. From what I heard, that's kind of standard at overnight camps: having a designated area away from the kids' prying eyes where staff can indulge. If it's a day camp, I mean...you can probably make it to the end of the day, can't you?
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Yeah, that was pretty rampant among staff -- camp management would always give a big talk at the beginning of the summer warning that anyone caught with drugs or alcohol would be fired immediately, but I’m not sure that actually dissuaded many people.
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:)
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