The Opposite of Spoiled

by Ron Lieber

  Sociologist Allison Pugh refers to the tactics a parent might employ in seeking a more meaningful summer experience as “symbolic deprivation.” The symbolism here refers to the fact that there is only so much that most of us are realistically going to change about whatever lives we’ve set up for our families. And in the context of sleepaway camp, this isn’t Chris Rock’s vision of Camp Kick-Ass. The deprivation isn’t so much about keeping children away from kids who are exactly like them or exposing them to those who are much different. Instead, it’s about reminding them that they don’t need air-conditioning, travel teams, electronic gadgets, or even electricity to enjoy themselves. In fact, the camps that have few to none of those amenities may provide some of the best perspective of all.

  It’s not easy to find an overnight camp like this, given the trend in recent years toward ever-bigger water toys and spring-floored gymnastics studios and go-karts and horse-jumping rings and organic food in the no-longer-so-much mess halls. But there are a few holdouts, albeit ones that charge $1,250 per week for the privilege. At the end of a dirt road in a town called Belgrade, Maine, just over an hour northwest of Portland, sits a tiny house and a small dock. A counselor sits behind the wheel of a motorboat that serves as a kind of shuttle bus to a 3-acre island a short trip away. And it is there that Pine Island Camp has hosted no more than 90 boys for at least six weeks during the summer since 1902.

  The boys sleep in open-sided tents. There is no electricity, save what powers a few appliances in the dining hall. Bathing happens with biodegradable soap in the lake, naked for all the passing boaters to see. (They have learned to avert their eyes over the years.) The only bathroom is an elevated perch; you climb up a set of stairs, open a screen door and see as many as three boys (or their counselors) sitting on a single wooden board no more than 15 feet wide. The board has three holes, and a composting toilet sits below. A giant window opens up to the lake and its various boats and birds. Campers call it a loo with a view, and it’s certainly scenic; they also seem used to visitors popping their heads in just to lay eyes on it. When much of the island burned in 1995, donations poured in from families and alumni, and the rebuilding left things much as they had been except for that new bit of electricity. “I’ve had people step ashore and, not having been here for 60 years, be kind of stunned,” said the camp’s director, Ben Swan, after a group of his older campers showed me around one day. “It’s essentially the same place. I don’t think there’s anywhere else in their life where that is likely to be true.”

  There are no team sports on a day-to-day basis at Pine Island. Swan’s father, who bought the camp in 1946 with his two brothers, was a non-jock who almost got kicked out of the University of Virginia for protesting that it had built a mammoth football stadium before it had a decent library. Instead, the emphasis is on activities like canoeing, swimming, and other skills necessary to get the most out of the camping trips that the boys eventually take. Nighttime entertainment comes courtesy of the campers and whatever games and skits they invent. One Pine Island maxim is “re-creation, not recreation,” which reflects a desire to send boys home with a lot more confidence and much more awareness of others. “One of the things most valuable about this place, because there isn’t much here, is something that I think a vast number of elite colleges have lost,” Swan told me while overlooking the lake. “Everyone here is needed to make it work. And that’s a huge gift to these kids. There’s nothing here! The games are the games that they make up. When everything is all set up for you and your dorm room looks like the Ritz, you won’t have to decorate it or maybe they won’t even let you.”

  Then, he got a twinkle in his eye, thinking about the kinds of affluent communities where his campers tend to reside in the off-season. “Who is needed in New Canaan, Connecticut?” he said. “Nobody! They don’t need you.”

  Pine Island Camp is practically singular, but for comparison I visited Birch Rock Camp, another Maine institution that’s well known for being the kind of place you seek out when you want to provide an antidote to whatever it is that’s surrounding your boys during the school year. It’s off a paved road, not a dirt one. The baseball diamond on some leased farmland at the turnoff provides evidence of at least a bit of competition, though the infield is uneven and it lacks much of a right field.

  But then I parked my car on a patch of grass and walked down a steep hill to Lake McWain, following clumps of boys and a few adults who were there for an alumni lunch. On the waterfront, all the campers were gathered in their maroon T-shirts keeping an eye on a speck in the water that was slowly coming closer. Birch Rock boys are serious swimmers, and each summer they attempt a long-distance swim. The younger boys begin with a summer of training to complete the Duck, a half-mile across, and then the Loon, out and back, and so on. Only when you are among the oldest boys can you sign up for the Whale, a lap around the lake of more than five miles. All summer, these older boys are in training, and starting two weeks before the end of the camp, they begin taking their shot at it.

  As the speck grew near that day, a buzz rose and then, in unison, a chant as the aspiring Whaler came closer stroke by stroke.

  “I BELIEVE THAT GABE CAN SWIM!”

  “I BELIEVE THAT GABE CAN SWIM!”

  “I BELIEVE THAT GABE CAN SWIM!”

  “I BELIEVE THAT GABE CAN SWIM!”

  I did not know Gabe and had yet to meet a single person at the camp, but I found myself holding back tears. The cheers grew to roars as Gabe reached the dock, followed by his spotter in a canoe. Before he even had a chance to break his stroke, his counselors pulled him in in a single fluid motion, onto the dock, and into a cocoon of blankets. From there, he stumbled slowly up a walkway through a gauntlet of screaming, backslapping fellow campers so he could be whisked off to the nurse, who would check him over for hypothermia.

  The Whale, I later learned, is the moment that Birch Rock boys anticipate for years, and it doesn’t require a water-ski boat or a stable of horses and fancy riding gear. “We don’t think about stuff, we think about soul,” said Rich Deering, the camp’s alumni and community director. “A lot of my colleagues, their perception of camp is that they want kids to have a lot of things that are cutting-edge in terms of technology. Like photography. What we want to do is give them a twist of something they don’t have access to at home.”

  How to Get Vacations Right

  Most of us aren’t wealthy enough to vacation regularly at the Four Seasons or the Ritz-Carlton. But for the parents who can afford to leave town in high style for every major vacation, there is often wariness about the expectations such trips set up. Such a feeling crept up on Stephanie Joss when she heard her two children, ages 8 and 10, comparing the merits of various Four Seasons resorts. Both she and her husband come from middle-class families. They’ve grown wealthy through long hours spent over two decades working in investment banking and the law. When they leave New York City during their limited time off, they want to treat themselves to hotel stays and experiences that are as relaxing and memorable as possible. Still, Joss can’t quite shake the nagging question of whether her children need a bit of a reality reset.

  Should parents who can afford to vacation in whatever way they want practice symbolic deprivation on their trips as well? The Josses are not all about five-star resorts and private guides. They’ve visited the Liberty Bell and toured Amish country. Their children also travel with relatives who don’t have nearly as much money. On a recent trip to upstate New York, her son came back with stories about how much fun the motel was that they had stayed in with his aunt and grandmother. “It was great because it had a Coke machine,” Joss said, recalling her son’s excitement, “which the Four Seasons doesn’t. If you want a Coke, you have to call and then they bring you a $50 Coke.”

  The soda encounter proves a larger point: However much adults may enjoy having hotel attendants bring them strawberries and Evian spray poolside for a week or two each year, kids remember everyday experiences just as well, or ev
en better. Here’s one tactic that parents can use to deliver them: For every week you’re at a resort try to take a day or part of one to get away from it. Figure out what local families do, and go do that. Maybe it’s the biggest playground or the most popular public pool. Farmers markets and other open-air bazaars offer all sorts of adventures; find food that no one in the family has ever eaten before, and persuade everyone to try it. Look up the local team that plays the most popular sport, and attend a game. Take the cheapest form of public transportation to get there. Traveling outside the United States? Wander around a grocery store for a while; kids observe all sorts of things about the local junk food that adults never notice. See if your friends have contacts in the area and get yourself invited to someone’s home or neighborhood or workplace or block party.

  Stephanie Joss’s daughter has asked her whether traveling with her grandmother will mean waiting in lots of lines, or whether they’ll have a guide who will arrange for them to skip the lines as they sometimes do when she goes with her parents. This question is one that plenty of vacationers face, given how many American amusement parks now allow families to pay a few hundred dollars more in exchange for a front-of-the-line pass for the day. Time is money, and the investment may make sense in purely economic terms for a family who wants to pack a lot into each trip.

  But cutting in line is something one just doesn’t do, and kids are particularly sensitive to that rule from an early age. Paying money to do it on vacation and marching right by the other kids in a park that’s supposed to be full of amusements for all sends an awfully confusing message. Parents who plan to do it should at least explain the system to their kids ahead of time: Sometimes having more money means getting to do things that other families can’t—and doing them in front of those very people. If that doesn’t seem fair or it makes kids uncomfortable, then line jumping is probably not such a great idea after all.

  One Family’s Journey and a Case Study for Our Kids

  As always, we’re in the adult-making business here. The goal is not to make our children feel bad about whatever advantages they have or to shun those advantages as they grow older. Nor should parents feel as if they have to apologize to their kids or anyone else for their own good fortune. Having more than enough money is a great thing. What we don’t want, however, are children who have no curiosity about people who are different from them and no understanding of what it might be like to have less. We’re trying to imprint sensitivity and a lack of presumption that everyone is alike in their resources and the choices available to them.

  This awareness is necessary because sometimes the differences among children aren’t something they stop to consider. When Ruth Mendoza landed at Logan International Airport in Boston on January 11, 1987, she was a young woman from Bolivia whose mother had recently died. She spoke almost no English and was there to work as a babysitter for a family in suburban Needham. The arrangement was illegal, though she didn’t know it at the time. Eventually, through the help of some kind neighbors of the family she first worked for, she found a better job. Not long after, she got married and obtained a green card.

  Mendoza’s new employers had high hopes for their child, enrolling her in the Meadowbrook School, a private junior-kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in Weston, one of the wealthiest communities in the state. The school was beautiful, with gray-shingled Cape Cod–style buildings and rolling green athletic fields. By 1992, Ruth was going there every day to pick up the girl in her care. The family had high hopes for Ruth as well. They helped her with her budget, and she was eventually able to buy a used car. Crucially, they also allowed her to bring her own baby to her babysitting job, which helped her save money on daycare.

  When it came time for Ruth to enroll her own daughter in school, the family she worked for asked her to consider something that hadn’t even occurred to her: applying to Meadowbrook. “My first impression was no, I could never belong there as a parent,” she said. “I tried to avoid the conversation. I remember missing the deadlines.” A year later she finally applied, and she remembers the mixer for candidate families like it was yesterday. “Very fancy ladies, all dressed up, talking about things I couldn’t quite relate to,” she said. “I just thought, well, here I am, and these people seem very lovely and I’m sure their children are lovely, and this is one of only how many social screenings? That’s when I realized we probably wouldn’t get in.”

  But her daughter Melissa did get in, and the school embraced the family when she enrolled in 1996. They received enough financial aid that Ruth paid just $600 a year for tuition. She straddled the role of nanny picking up one student and parent tending another as best she could, and by 2002 she enrolled in a weekend program to try to earn the college degree she had been working toward for years. The next year, a job as an after-school teacher at Meadowbrook came up, and Ruth applied and got it. The schedule flexibility and benefits allowed her to finish her college degree in 2005, at which point something totally unexpected happened: The beloved kindergarten teacher who had taught both Ruth’s daughter and her employer’s daughter decided to retire. Meadowbrook gave the job to Ruth.

  The transition from nanny to teacher was not without its challenges, but at least Ruth’s status at the school had changed slowly over time. In the workplace, there was more pride than awkwardness in how far Ruth had come. Her daughters—three of them eventually—have remained on scholarship throughout their time there. And they feel their difference acutely. One daughter came home one day after a return from school vacation and asked, “Didn’t you know we were supposed to go to Florida for a week?” No, Ruth replied, what made her think that? “Everyone went to Florida for a week,” her daughter told her.

  Some of the toughest slights, however, are more subtle, built as they are on hurtful assumptions and decisions that plenty of well-meaning teenagers make. Many schools allow kids to go out for lunch, which is potentially problematic. Some kids can go whenever and wherever they want without thinking about the cost. Others must bring their lunch every day because their families don’t have anything left over for midday meals at Chipotle or Subway. And financial aid—even a full ride—doesn’t include a stipend for off-campus meals.

  One day Ruth picked one of her daughters up from the train and discovered that she was famished. What did she have for lunch? Nothing. So why didn’t she eat? A friend at the high school she went to after Meadowbrook had asked her to come out with her for lunch, but she told the friend that she didn’t have any money. The friend had some and said it would be no problem; she had another friend coming and was going to cover her, too. Off they went for bagels. Just as Ruth’s daughter was about to order, her friend clarified the terms of the deal: She could just repay her tomorrow. At which point Ruth’s daughter issued her own clarification: “No, you don’t understand. I can’t pay tomorrow, because tomorrow I’ll have no money either. I thought I’d told you that I had no money.”

  What would we want our own kids to do in that situation? It’s a small school. The families know one another. By the time the kids are going off campus for lunch, they’re old enough to understand that some families have much more money than others and that they probably have classmates who can’t afford much in the way of extras. Even if Ruth’s daughter’s friend didn’t know that about the family, the revelation that she had no money to repay her should have changed the situation. They could have turned around and gone back to school to eat, so Ruth’s daughter could have eaten the lunch that the school provides each day. Or her friend, who was not struggling financially herself, could have bought her lunch and told her not to worry about it.

  On that day, however, neither of those things happened. The friends bought lunch only for themselves. And since school rules forbid the students from walking alone outside school property, Ruth’s daughter couldn’t just go back to campus right away. Instead, she had to watch her friends eat and then walk back to school with them. By the time they returned, it was too late for her to eat lunch i
n the cafeteria, since she had to go straight to class.

  Ruth had a variety of mixed feelings when she heard the story. “In the moment, you are angry,” she said. “This may sound awful, but sometimes you accept that this is how it needs to be. My daughters are getting something that I could not afford, and some of their classmates are living such a sheltered life and can’t see any other reality. It does make me wonder what else I’m missing, though. Kids only tell you so much.”

  So she let it go, and she takes pains to make it clear that she’s not bitter about it. “This still feels like a dream to me,” she said, sweeping her arms toward the well-equipped library where we were sitting, next to the classroom that she oversees. “That I am actually here and that this is my new reality, like somebody needs to pinch me.”

  Still, no parent ever wants their child to hurt another in this way. As I raise my own daughter, I think about this story often because someday, my daughter may be the friend with the lunch money. I want her to know what the right thing to do is, instinctively.

  9

  How Much Is Enough?

  All about trade-offs

  When I first started searching for parents with useful ideas about how to talk to kids about money, I was seeking two things. I wanted to find mothers and fathers who had acted on those ideas in unique ways. I also hoped to figure out what overarching philosophy or instinct was behind all their great ideas. There were plenty of people with good stories to tell about family rituals around spending, saving, giving, and talking about money. But there were very few with any kind of governing principle—a god, guru, book, question, or something else—that guided them when trying to use money to help teach their kids values.

  I distinctly remember sitting in Keely and Mick Solimene’s kitchen outside Chicago and asking them about this issue from every angle. How did her working-class upbringing, his work in investment banking, and their time in Barrington coalesce into a blueprint that led to their decision to downsize and pursue charitable work? I assumed that they had thought long and hard about all the decisions they had made along the way and how they would discuss them with their children.