My son has been going to a day camp during the weekdays these past few weeks and it’s been great. I have a workday over the summer and he gets some much-needed time away from home interacting with other kids his age while school is out. That’s been a challenge for us in the past with him, as an only child, but we found an affordable day camp in our town and we signed him up for it.
It was going great until there was an issue with one of the kids hitting the other kids at the camp. You would not believe my astonishment when I discovered the kid doing the hitting was mine.
After some investigation we determined what was going on. To my relief it wasn’t because he was going around bullying other kids. Every incident began with him being provoked and his physical reaction was him “defending” himself. It would have been one thing if these provocations were physical, but they were verbal, and that shouldn’t warrant swinging your water bottle at someone’s head. At nine years old you tell a camp counselor, not swing for the fences.
We were mortified. If you had told me years ago that I would be the father of the kid at summer camp who was hitting other children I would have laughed in your face. But here we were.
Our son finally received one last warning from the camp: if he hit out at someone one more time he wouldn’t be allowed to return.
So I made the executive decision to pull out the threat of the biggest punishment he would ever receive if he crossed that line once more: if he hit out at someone at camp one more time and got kicked out, he would be forbidden from playing his precious video games for the remainder of the summer.
It seems to have worked.
To put this all into a less dramatic scale, there were three singular incidents over the course of three days about two weeks ago. Since that streak of physical reactions to verbal provocation we’ve reminded him, every day before camp, that he’s still only one altercation away from the biggest punishment of his life, and if anyone does anything to upset him he needs to tell a camp counselor instead of acting like a vigilante.
We’re glad he’s behaving himself but it’s made camp a little more stressful for all of us. Still, threatening him with the “nuclear option” of punishments seems to have scared him straight. With luck he’ll keep up his good behavior because I don’t want him to lose his video game time. It keeps him out of my hair for an additional hour or two after camp is over, after all.