GET ENGAGED.

That was my dad's line. Dr. Schott (always Dr. Schott) ran weekend house projects the way some people run operations. Work to do on the house? My brothers and I were part of it.

We'd be holding the flashlight while he fixed whatever needed fixing, and at some point the light would drift. Usually, because one of us had snuck a book in. You'd hear it from somewhere inside the ceiling.

GET ENGAGED.

That meant getting that flashlight trained back on the right spot. My brothers and I still bring it up.

This week, my parents are at K&E helping us prep the lodges before summer. Pam Schott is scrubbing bathroom fans and painting around doors.

Dr. Schott is in a four-foot crawl space above one of the lodge ceilings, climbing one furnaces, inspecting the motors for the bathroom fans, installing exhaust fans for Cedar. Not glamorous work at all, but so much of camp prep is things like this.

My job: hold the flashlight, hand him tools. I'm eight years old again.

Dr. Schott never really explained why any of it mattered. The house was his, and that was reason enough.

My reason back then was simpler: I didn't want to get “GET ENGAGED!” yelled my way.

The reason now is completely different. I love this camp. I want it to be a great place for kids.

That's what real engagement looks like. You cannot holler it into someone. The version that sticks is the one we find ourselves.

What we're after is the version they find on their own. Every kid who has ever loved camp found something specific that grabbed them. We build the conditions for that. We can't do the finding for them.

I've been trying to draw out what GET ENGAGED actually means when it works. It looks a lot like what I talked about in this video:

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There are two parts to real engagement, to reliance. The first is grit, the willingness to push through something hard. The second is decision-making, knowing which hard things are actually worth it.

A kid who only has grit works hard in the wrong direction. A kid who only has clear decision-making can see exactly where they want to go and never quite get there. You want both because that’s where resilience lives. The kid who knows what they want and can push through to get there is ready for whatever comes next.

I sketched it out again here:

Kids don't need a class on grit. They need to have a tough day and come out the other side knowing it was worth it.

More and more often, kids don't get many chances to do that. Things are either handed to them or decided for them. The muscle for making real decisions, and for pushing through hard ones, doesn't get much work.

Camp is different.

At K&E, the summer schedule sets up where they choose some activities. They like some. Don’t like others as much. And without walking through the whole day (again), it’s set up like this to flex these decision-making muscles through a schedule that just happens to be a ton of fun.

They figure out what they care about. Then they figure out what they can handle. Those two things together are what make a kid ready to move through the world on their own terms. That's not something you can teach. It's something they build.

That's what we're building this summer.

Getting engaged, really engaged, means having the grit to push through and the buy-in that makes it worth it.

You got this,

Jack

P.S. - This resonate with you? Feel free to text me at 585-451-5141 with any thoughts about summer for your kid at K&E. Or, just schedule a call to talk.​

114 Eagle Pond Rd, Wilmot, NH 03287
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