Jack Goes to Camp

I want to share a story that changed my life and how I looked at kids who hit or push. Before I had my own children, I used to volunteer for a week each year at a Unitarian church summer camp. The last 2 years I did this, I acted as the Dean, which is a little like being a school principal, if just for a week (along with months of planning). As Dean, I recruited all the volunteer staff, planned the week’s schedule, and was generally in charge of the entire operation (except for foodservice and maintenance). So… one year we had a boy I’ll call “Jack”. Jack was about 9 years old, and a hitter. By the second day of camp, the counselors and I were talking about sending him home, due to his aggressive behavior and hitting other campers. We held an emergency meeting of the adult staff to figure out what to do.

Now, I always really hate to send a child home from camp, because in my experience, it is often the child that you most want to send home that is the one that most needs to be there. But I was also mindful of the fact that we could not allow hitting. We had already tried reasoning, laying down the law, time outs, the threat of lost privileges, and so on, and Jack was not responding. He said to me, with great sorrow, that he didn’t want to be sent home, but also that he was not sure he could always remember to use words instead of fists. So I was in a quandary.

I believe that a good camp experience can change a child’s life. Because camp is a total immersion, 24-hour a day experience, and far removed from “real life”, it can have a profound effect. So, keeping that in mind, we decided to give Jack 24 hours more to see if we could fix the problem, with a new action plan in place. The camp chaplain, a wise and compassionate woman, offered her thoughts. “I’ve been spending some time with Jack, and I think he really wants to touch people, but he doesn’t know how. He wants human contact, and all he can think of is hitting.” So we hatched a plan…we adults would make every effort to touch Jack in appropriate ways, and also to model ways to touch others when Jack was watching. We would pat him on the back, put an arm around his shoulder, shake hands, ruffle his hair or give a hug. We also assigned a junior counselor (a teenager) to be Jack’s constant companion. This teenage boy would stick to Jack like a shadow, being alert for signs that a conflict was escalating so he could step in before things got physical.

We made it through the 24 hours without fists flying…then another day, and another. We had some close calls, but no actual hitting. By the end of the camp week, we were amazed. The angry, aggressive boy that had been Jack was acting happy, he had friends in his cabin group, and he had had a successful week at camp. When his mother came to pick him up, she was astonished. She said he was like a different child. She told us she had waited by the phone the whole week, just sure that we would send him home from camp sooner or later. It came out in our conversation that Jack was adopted as an older child, having been removed from a severely abusive home. “When he first came to us,” the mother said, “he was like a wild animal.” He struggled in school with behavior issues, and had few, if any, friends, so seeing him joking and laughing with his cabin-mates felt like a miracle to her.

Aside from wishing the mother had told us this BEFORE sending Jack to camp, this forever changed my thinking about aggression in children. This child was really a good kid, and he was only doing what he’d been taught by his abusive birth family. He was hurting inside, and knew no other way to express it. We could have tried more and different punishments to try to correct the behavior, but it took a 180 degree turn around in our approach to really make it work.

Other reasons children push or hit can be poor language skills (so they are physical out of frustration that they cannot communicate) or sensory integration dysfunction (in which the brain is not processing information from the senses in a typical way, so they need the sensory feedback of pushing or hitting). In any case, children who hit, push or crash into others, when punishment is clearly not solving the problem, I would encourage you to “think outside the time out” and try to figure out what is behind the behavior. If you can address the root problem, rather than the symptom you may have much greater success.