A Must-Listen-To Podcast before the Summer

We are big fans of Sissy Goff around here, and we know so many of you love her too! Her books have been staples for us for years, and we have learned so much from her and David Thomas through their podcast with Melissa Trevathan, Raising Boys and Girls. Sissy even does a video training for our staff during Orientation!

If you’ve never listened to the Raising Boys and Girls podcast, we can’t recommend it highly enough (our team has particularly loved their recent series on the ages and stages of childhood). But we were even more excited to see their recent episode interviewing our friends from Alpine Camp for Boys, Glenn and Carter Breazeale!

In this conversation, Glenn and Carter talk to Sissy and David about how they’ve seen children change over the last few decades, the value of working at camp for college students, spiritual growth at home, and what summer camp offers kids that they can’t get anywhere else (yes and amen to all of it!). We particularly loved their discussion on homesickness at camp - we couldn’t have said any of it better ourselves!

Glenn describes going away to camp and thinking about homesickness as a question of trust:

• Does your child know that you trust her to go away from you and be okay?
• Do you trust her to be able to advocate for herself and seek out help if she needs it?
• Do you trust that the camp will contact you if your child is having trouble?

Communicating that you are confident your child can thrive at camp goes such a long way! As Glenn and Carter mentioned, this is one of the reasons we urge you to not make a “pick-up deal” with your daughter or tell her that you will come get her if she’s not having fun. She needs to know that you trust her to handle camp on her own!

We could name 50 more things we loved about this podcast episode, but instead, we’d urge you to listen to it yourself. Glenn and Carter share so much parenting and camp wisdom, and we think you’ll be just as inspired and encouraged by it as we were! If you listen to it, we’d love to hear what jumped out at you as you think about your experience at Greystone. Send us a message and let us know!