placing children decently in
other than summer hotels.

The instant vogue of summer camps met a parental need, the need of
doing something with and for children with whom, released from school,
parents did not know how to live, finding in the camp an easy way out
of a harassing difficulty. Why do parents so live that in order to
have a simple, wholesome life for their children, it is necessary to
send them off to the woods in so-called camps the charm of which lies
in their maximum difference from hotels and in their parentlessness?
The unreasoned haste with which children flocked in multitudes to the
camps is a testimony to the failure of parents to live in normal,
intimate contact with their children, and a prophecy, I have no doubt,
of the conflict certain to develop out of the stimulated difference in
tastes between child and parents.

I, too, believe that children, especially city-reared children with
all their sophistications and urbanities, should be brought nearer to
the simplicities of nature during the vacation period. But why not by
the side and in the company when possible of parents? The truth is
that, apart from the merits and even excellence of some camps, parents
are so little accustomed to living with their children that when the
summer months force the child into constant contact with parents, the
latter grow embarrassed by the necessity for such contact, and the
camp is chosen as a convenient way out of a serious domestic problem.
My complaint is not against camps but against the multiplication of
them necessitated by the helplessness of parents who face the need of
sharing the life of their children. And some of these parents are the
very ones who will later wonder that "our children have grown away
from us."

I am often consulted by parents who express their grief at that strange
bent in their children, which moves a son or daughter to seek out low
types of amusement and the companionship bound up therewith. I quiz the
complaining parents and learn that no attempt was ever made parentally
to cultivate cleaner tastes, that the child was incessantly exposed to
all the vulgarities and indecencies of the virtually uncensored motion
picture theatre. Recreation is become a really serious problem in our
time, immeasurably more important than it was in the youth of the now
middle-aged, such as the writer, when a Punch and Judy show and a most
mild and quite immobile picture or stereopticon were consider