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I’m Running a ‘Common Sense Camp’ for My Kids This Summer
Forget Zoom Mandarin class — they’re learning how to change a tire, balance a checkbook, and read a map
One of my favorite single-panel comics from Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” features a boy pushing mightily against a door marked “pull.” Above him, a sign announces the building as a “School for the Gifted.”
It’s an image I’ve thought about more than once since becoming a parent. As my kids — now 12 and 17 — got older, it became clear that they were, let’s say, heavy on the book smarts. Sometimes, when my husband and I would observe our children struggling with ordinary tasks, we’d joke that they could benefit from Common Sense Camp.
The joke was never entirely that funny. In her book How To Raise an Adult, a manifesto that exposes the harms of helicopter parenting, Julie Lythcott-Haims asks, “Did the safety-conscious, academic achievement-focused, self-esteem-promoting, checklisted childhood that has been commonplace since the mid-1980s, and in many communities has become the norm, rob kids of the chance to develop into healthy adults?” When my kids enter the real world, I want them to know how to pay a bill, change a tire, and be a good neighbor.
