Letting go means different things to families. Growth. Independence. Opportunities. No arena is more challenging for parents than entrusting their child’s well-being to others. At home, we have our medicine cabinets brimming with bright Band-Aids® and children’s cold medicines, not to mention the ready hug and kiss when the need arises. So, what’s a camp to do?
Raising Global Children by Stacie Nevadomski Berdan and Marshall S. Berdan provides the rationale and a host of practical ideas to develop a global mindset in children. Published by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, this book explores the challenges and successes of many Americans who want to foster an important set of global skills in their children to help them both become better citizens and increase opportunities for success in college and beyond.
A young Montana woman who dreams of studying languages at the university finds herself alone, teaching school children in a harsh, wind-wracked winter landscape, her fiancé having left her, and her family unable to send her back to study after a mind-opening first college year. This is the figure at the center of Mildred Walker’s Winter Wheat, first published during WWII and published again by the University of Nebraska Press in 1992.
And the Mountains Echoed can be compared to an intricate mosaic, having brilliant colors and various shapes, fitting together to form a unified and complex pattern.
By Denise Phillippe
Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character belongs on the “must read” list of anyone raising children or working with them in a school or camp setting.
The ideas presented in the book are important related to raising any child from infancy and to working with children from impoverished backgrounds as well as with children being raised in such protected ways that they are shielded from life’s regular difficulties, which also serve as potential growth opportunities.
