Is a camp that teachers kids about hacking brilliant or bogus?

I know of a family who once sent their 9-year-old son to a gun safety class. It was a good idea in theory, I guess, considering they keep guns in the home. But the reality is that the 9-year-old boy was mostly just interested in firing a gun and had zero interest in safety. As far as the kid was concerned, the class was simply expensive target practice that he could brag about to friends.

That’s kind of how I look at a kids-only summer camp for hackers. The idea behind it is to sway the next generation of computer whizzes to do good things online instead of sinister things like breaching security of major companies and governments. But the reality, I suspect, is that most of the kids will be psyched to learn more tricks of the trade on how to break and enter computer systems that very much want to keep them out.

The Defcon Kids conference — the first of its kind — will be held in Las Vegas this August. Kids between eight and 16 will learn how to hack computers as well as protect themselves against cyber-attacks.

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Why let kids fritter away the summer when liberty is at stake?

I got your summer camp gap solution right here, Carolyn. Sure, it’s only a week — and, OK, only in the mornings — but it’s fun, affordable and will develop a love of God, country and Constitution in a way that no liberal fact-lover like yourself ever could.

I’m talking about Tea Party camp. Continue reading »

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What do you do with the kids before summer camp starts?

MP Dunleavey at DailyWorth, a financial site for women, has (as far as I can tell) coined the phrase “Camp Gap.” The “Camp Gap” encompasses the days between the end of the school year and the beginning of summer camp, when women are faced with the harsh reality of “insufficient, overpriced, erratic child care choices for working families.” The emphasis is Dunleavey’s, but it might as well be mine. My daughter’s last day of school is June 28, and her summer camp – which is only half-day – begins the second week of July.

Dunleavey writes, “When someone bemoans the lack of women in corporate leadership—currently less than 20% occupy C-suite positions—I feel like screaming: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” Ha! No kidding. How are we supposed to get to work if there’s no one to watch the kids? Continue reading »

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For over 200 years kids have watched circus acts with wonder and anticipation, and not a few have hoped to run off to join it themselves.  A popular New York circus camp lets kids do just that without leaving the comfort of home.

Hundreds of kids in New York are spending the summer learning skills like juggling, clowning, and walking the high wire.

Beats spending the summer in front of the Wii.  So what’s the draw?
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Remember the worlds of imagination you traversed as a kid? Sorcerors and dragons sprang from nehind bushes. Robin Hood and his Merry Men roamed the woods behind the house and Marilyn Monroe was hanging out with Madonna in the bathroom mirror, just waiting to be unleashed for a music video shoot.

Or maybe that was just my house.

These days, you can hardly make it through the day without stumbling over some pundit or other bemoaning kids’ lack of imagination, lack of interest in books, and lack of creativity. Newsweek ran a major story this month on the creativity crisis in America.

None of that is in evidence at the make-believe camps that are springing up around the country. Based on popular children’s books, these camps give kids a chance to attend Hogwarts, train with Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or dive into the Daring Book for Girls.

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Consumer Reports – known more for its ratings of cars and appliances – recently surveyed almost 1,000 parents of children with ADHD and discovered that only 67 percent felt that ADHD medications had significantly helped their children.  “Only 52 percent of parents agreed strongly that if they had to do it all over again, they would have their kids take medication.  And 44 percent said they wished there was another way to help their child,” MSNBC reports.  Many parents felt the use of supplemental treatments such as “hiring tutors, switching schools, modifying diets, and changing the way they spoke to their children” were essential in mitigating ADHD symptoms.

Dr. Orly Avitzur, a neurologist and medical adviser to the magazine, is encouraged by the news, noting that ”kids improve the most when medication is coupled with complementary approaches, such as behavioral therapy and strategies to help with academics.”

Adding dietary supplements such as fish oil have also proven to help children with ADHD.  Conversely, consuming American fast-foods have an adverse affect.  A study published this month in the Journal of Attention Disorders “found that kids had more than twice the risk of developing ADHD if they ate a ‘Western diet’ that consisted of energy dense, heavily processed foods that were rich in saturated fat, salt and sugars and low in omega-3 fatty acids, fiber and folate.”

Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center, presumes that the low satisfaction rate with ADHD meds among parents may be because medications can be seen as a “band-aid or crutch.”  So it’s not surprising that many parents take the opportunity while their children are at summer camp to give them a medication vacation.  But WebMD reports that these “drug holidays” can be problematic for campers and counselors. Continue reading »

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Free-range parenting guru Lenore Skenazy recently wrote about a new rule at her kids’ camp:  If a counselor wants to hug a camper, the counselor has to bend down to the kid’s level so the child’s face isn’t anywhere near the counselor’s “groin.”

I was a camper and later, a camp counselor and part of what made camp so special for me was the strong camper-counselor bond. I’d hate for that connection to be sullied by displaced by paranoia. Continue reading »

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