Over the weekend, I read a story in the New York Times about these Brooklyn kids who go to a summer camp based on a book.
Camp Half-Blood, as it’s called, is based on the Percy Jackson series in which young Percy finds out that he is half Greek-god. (That Zeus. Such a wolf.) So at the camp, all the kids operate under the same assumption. That each of them has one god as a parent.
My first thought was that the whole thing was pretty funny, especially one of the quoted kids, who said he went to the camp to train. Because he thinks that the god-parent thing could, in his case, be true. (My hope is that people who matter are keeping a close eye on this kid.)
But my second thought was just how different childhood might be for Jack. Because if I went to a camp based on a book when I was in grade school — assuming that such a thing was even thought up to exist — I wouldn’t have gotten interviewed in the New York Times about it. I would have gotten the crap kicked out of me for being a nerd.
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Even at his age, I want people to like Jack. He’s at that point where being a baby isn’t going to carry all of the water in that regard anymore. Aspects of his personality are really starting to come out, more each day. The hope is that we’re not raising a little jerk, someone who is mean and disrespectful and self-centered. I’m pretty sure we’re not.
That’s a universal hope. That as a parent, I’m raising a nice little human.
But there’s a funny thing that comes with interests, especially as a kid. How you can get categorized and ridiculed just for things that you like. There was a girl, in my grade school, who loved Shaun Cassidy — think Justin Bieber, just older — to the point of distraction. She had gotten this outfit, where his face was silkscreened on both her pants and shirt. I don’t remember what we said, exactly, but I remember much howling and laughter and pointing.
I don’t think she ever wore it again.
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So much of that kind of judgement, at least in broad stokes, seems irrelevant now. So many things that were invitations to ridicule when I was younger just aren’t such a big invitation anymore.
Reading? Cool, thanks to Harry Potter and iPads. Superheroes and comic books? There wouldn’t have summer movies without them. Computers? Um. I think society would implode without those. Dancing? Cooking? Singing? If reality television has one redeeming quality, it’s in making each of these activities less make-funnable. (In high school, being in a band was cool. Singing wasn’t. I didn’t understand it then. I don’t understand it now.)
I’m not naive enough to say these kind of judgements have disappeared. They haven’t. Not from the playground. Not from the office, for that matter.
But kids, and people, should like what they like (as long as it isn’t things like Nazis and torturing cats) and not be made to feel inadequate or strange because of it.
If I have one wish, as a father, it’s that I hope that my kid is spared some of the crap I dealt with when I was younger. It seems like he might, if Camp Half-Blood is any indication. But I want to teach him that what people say doesn’t matter, either. To never let someone else’s judgement get in his head and keep him from doing something he loves. To never be ashamed of who he is.
I think about this, when he grabs a Batman action figure off my bookshelf, starts dancing in the middle of the living room and then, when the song ends, walks around in a circle for a while, talking to himself, before collapsing on the floor and opening a book.
I think, “Go, Jack. Go.”
Alan Kercinik is a marketing type/dad who, right now, is probably hanging out with his wife, walking the dog, reading, listening to music, ranting about some movie or television show, toiling away on a novel or telling his son not to climb on something. The opinions expressed on Always Jacked are his, but they are probably influenced by his wife.
