I have always counted myself as someone who isn’t great with kids. I can hold a baby or compliment my cousin’s three-year-old on his shirt while his mom grabs his snacks. But when thinking of career paths or even considering volunteer opportunities, childcare has never come to mind as a fully feasible option. Spontaneous crying and snot makes me nervous and knowing all the words to every Disney princess song has not proven to be as effective a soothing strategy as it was in 2010 when I was feeling particularly weepy.
And so, when the search for a summer job got desperate enough for me to accept a position as a “Recreation Specialist” for the Downtown YMCA in Erie, I relied heavily on the word “recreation” as a synonym to the word “fun” which, in my mind absolved me of any true child care. I gathered from the description and the interview that I would be playing outdoor games with kids all day. I would not be wiping tears or calling parents: I was simply a “fun specialist.”
It turns out that, at the time, I was really only specializing in delusion.
Some background: The YMCA Summer Parks Program is a nine-week day camp that is free to any child between the ages of 6 and 17. The program takes place at various parks across the city, each with two counselors equipped with a ball bag, cooler, water jug, bottle of hand soap, first aid kit, a bin full of coloring books and board games and a pop-up tent in case of rain. I would spend most of my time at McKinley Park, which was not located in the safest area of the city. A state-funded lunch is served every day at 11:30 a.m. followed by an afternoon snack.
When fully functioning, the program spans nine parks across the city, but due to staff shortages, this summer only saw five open. The counselor or “fun specialist” job that I had just taken had an almost 100% turnover rate.
That summer, we were tasked with wrangling up to 26 kids at a time in a park, all various ages, with various necessary accommodations. We dealt with angry parents, people on drugs sleeping at our picnic tables in the middle of the day and fights between children on a daily basis. We were launched out of our comfort zones and driven out of our minds.
But although the day-to-day function of the camp brought challenges through shards of broken glass bottles on the basketball court, gleams of light shined through.
For two months, we taught the kids to play tennis and pickleball, encouraged them to eat the suspicious cherry tomatoes that were in their state lunches, and listened to them talk about how excited they were for their mother to have their baby brother at the end of the summer. We danced to their favorite songs, had our own version of the Olympics and went on nature walks each morning to get our wiggles out.
It was the hardest and the best summer of my life.
Reason 1: Talking to them is simple, but listening to them makes you think.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned the value of optics in every aspect of my life. “What do I look like to friends, peers, family and authorities in relation to what they expect from me? How can my actions be a reflection of the person that I believe others want me to be?” Those questions get more complicated and ridiculous as they pile onto one another.
But the kids didn’t ask those.
They asked, “Why are you the way you are?” and not, “Why aren’t you like us?” They wonder. And they voice their innermost thoughts, however blunt they may be. But they aren’t hateful, and they accept the answers. They haven’t yet been shown the importance of optics, but instead, place importance on who can throw a Nerf football the farthest, or ask them what they ate for dinner last night, or better yet, who listens to their response.
Responses to questions like that opened my mind to the truth about the lives that most of the kids were living, and suddenly, the hours of 10-4 at McKinley Park became much more important than bandaids, bracelets and basketballs.
Reason 2: Children are great at moving forward.
At McKinley Park, any one problem, argument or scrape on the knee couldn’t get more than five minutes of attention or tears. The kids didn’t want to cry. They wanted to keep playing, keep laughing, keep going. They didn’t let little setbacks stop them from achieving their goal for the day, which was often to simply outplay one another before snack time. They didn’t worry, at least about the small things. Some actually seemed to have way bigger things to worry about. But on a day that the sun was shining, colored pencils were sharpened, and kick balls were inflated, worrying seemed pointless.
Reason 3: Children jog our memory.
This summer camp was not a sports or science camp. There were no academic skills to be taught or learned, no set plan for the day. It was counselors, kids, crayons and a ball bag against the clock. And with mostly young children, no one was self-entertaining. And so we had to make our own fun, a skill that I have found becomes weaker as we age.
The kids didn’t have a reason to draw rainbows on the pavement with chalk even when the forecast called for rain. There weren’t medals for three hours spent playing four square or tennis by house rules. I counted a day as a success when everyone was fed and laughing and it took me a second to adjust to those being the highest priorities. No grades, no quotas, no stakes. They just did things to do them.
I forgot what it was like to live with such a mindset, but the kids brought me back to the days of writing stories with markers on printer paper so that I could read them to my stuffed animals. I was reunited with the little girl who wore everything in her closet that looked cute on a given day regardless of if it matched.
Funnily enough, most of my hours at McKinley Park were spent forgetting. I forgot to worry about things I couldn’t control, admittedly one of my favorite pastimes. Instead, I remembered that poorly dressed little author and realized how much I missed her.
To the kids at McKinley Park, thank you for waking me up. Thank you for showing me fun. With you, doing nothing taught me everything. I honestly think that that might be what the best fun in life is, when nothing becomes everything.