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Bringing professionalism to camp counseling.

Article Excerpt
With everything that can be regulated and measured for American Camp Association accreditation, it seems the one evasive thing continues to be how to measure the actual quality of camp counseling that is done at any individual camp--and to what extent it is truly promoting growth and development--making a difference--rather than simply keeping kids safe. The fact is that most camp counselors have little more than a common sense background in counseling and guiding youth and often the few role plays they do during orientation rarely match up with what the real thing is going to be like.

I recall when my friends and I were sixteen-year-old "junior counselors" at summer camp in Wisconsin in the early 1980s, we would joke that we were professional counselors. After all, we were counselors, and we were being paid (if you call $350 for nine weeks of work pay!). It didn't take long for the campers to arrive and teach us that the week of orientation we'd spent raking leaves and painting cabins had little to do with the reality of resolving disputes between ten-year-olds or calming the homesick eight-year-old. Left to our own devices, we would settle a group by threatening to take things away, resolve conflicts by trying to reason with them, and sooth homesickness by doing the common sense thing that came to mind--talk to them about home! Needless to say our efforts at intervention often proved futile.

When a new director took over the following year we were introduced to a whole new concept of learning real counseling skills. The rakes and paint brushes were replaced with sessions around the...