Opinion> Lenore Skenazy> Camp Is Too Cushy

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Camp Is Too Cushy

"Hello, Muddah. Hello, Faddah. I just had a venti latte! Camp is very entertaining, and the spa is just so soothing when it's raining."

That could be the next letter you get from your kid at camp — provided he is not too busy studying broadcast journalism, French pastry making or the art of getting a pedicure.

"They're really becoming not camps, but resorts," said recreation specialist Jeff Evans. "It started out 20 years ago, when camps got into waterskiing and those types of higher-end recreational activities, and it's gone crazy."

How crazy?

There's a camp about 90 minutes from Los Angeles called Pali Overnight Adventures. A one-week session costs $1,535. Kids attending the "Rock Star" session write songs with the help of studio musicians who actually work in the music biz.

Should they choose the "Secret Agent Camp" session instead, they get to ride around on child-sized ATVs and plot how to kidnap and interrogate people. (Mr. Rumsfeld, are you working at a camp these days?) Another session takes budding Hannah Montanas on real auditions for real talent agents, or the kids can go for a week of stunt trick instruction by a real Hollywood stuntman.

Any child who wants to soak her feet in something other than a murky lake has the option of an afternoon pedicure. Pali's promise? "Never a dull moment!"

As if that's a good thing.

Look, all those activities sound extremely exciting (with, perhaps, the exception of getting one's toes painted). But I'm not sure that's the point of summer.

The rest of the year already is packed with homework and tutoring and a chance to study everything from yodeling to yoga.

If my own offspring are any indication, kids throw themselves into — or are thrown by their well-meaning parents into — music lessons and robotics class and religious school (OK, that's definitely us doing the throwing) and baseball. Come springtime, they are really horrible to live with.

Er. I mean come springtime, the poor things are worn out. We are, too. Enough already with the enhancing enhancements of an enhanced, enriched, unending education. My kids are so well-rounded you could roll them down a bowling alley.

And I'm considering it.

Then, at last, comes June.

I know that even in my generation, most kids did not make a raft out of sticks and float lazily down the Mississippi. But at least summer was markedly different from the rest of the year. If you went to camp, it was a time of bad food and weird rashes and freezing in the pool the place was too cheap to heat.

All right, I hated camp. But it did get me outside, and more importantly, it got me away from all the teachers and classes bent on polishing one more aspect of my precocious, pre-collegiate self. Too many camps today are just part of the extracurricular-industrial complex. Build friendships, build fires, but don't go off for the summer to build résumés.

That's why "Camp Granada" — folk singer Allen Sherman's fictitious home of bugs, bumps and blubbering brothers — is sounding better every day.

Muddah? Faddah? Sign 'em up.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at The New York Sun and Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.