The Delta Issue #43

What my sons are learning at “How to Be a Person Camp”

Having three boys between the ages of 1 and 9 means summer is a time of joyful and exhausting chaos in the Baghian household. Without the routine of the school year, my husband and I piece together full-time summer camps, playdates, and parenting between work obligations. I imagine many of you are in the same boat.

Despite the chaos, something I’m looking forward to is our How to Be a Person Camp. It’s an idea from bestselling author Emily Ley , who writes the #1 parenting newsletter on Substack.

Here’s how it works: I ask my sons what life skills they want to learn (and contribute a few of my own) so they can become more independent. This list becomes our How to Be a Person syllabus.

This year, the Baghian boys are learning to:

Make scrambled eggs and pancakes: Mornings are nuts. Rather than me handing out cereal, we’ve decided the two older boys are grown enough to make themselves a healthy breakfast.
Pack a nutritious lunch: i.e., not just string cheese and Gatorade. If they can think ahead to how hungry they’ll be in four hours and pack more than a bag of chips on their own, that will be a great success.
Calculate a tip: Calculating a tip is one of the fundamentals of adulting in America. Learning to tip is a great way for my kids to exercise their math skills over the summer.
Buy milk at the grocery store: This one is a natural progression from a previous Baghian tradition (inspired by Jonathan Haidt ). Every Saturday for the past several years, our family has gotten donuts. And since he was six years old, our middle child has been the one to go into the store, order the donuts, pay, and tip (!) while I wait in the parking lot. Now he’s ready to graduate from the donut shop to the grocery store, and milk is the obvious purchase because my boys drink literally gallons of it every week.
Do their own laundry: Three boys produce a LOT of dirty clothes. One person can’t keep up. I doubt they’ll do all their laundry on their own, but I’m looking forward to a day when my boys can gather their clothes in the laundry room, know how to use the washer and dryer, and remember that colors are washed cold and whites are washed warm. And if they must be washed together (because who has time for sorting), the answer is cold.
Load and unload the dishwasher: There are two types of people in the world: Those who load the dishwasher haphazardly and those who rearrange the haphazard dishwasher. Part of becoming a person is becoming a good housemate — and one of my greatest wishes is for all of my sons to become men who can keep a house and be good partners.
Become “social detectives”: In preparation to go to a new school next year, my sons are brushing up on their social skills over the summer. We recently found a book called “You Are a Social Detective!” that explains implicit social contexts in terms of “expected” and “unexpected” behaviors. The book teaches things like how to read a room and why eye contact is important, and it’s helped all our kids learn the unspoken norms of social interaction.

Article content — Charlie buys donuts on vacation.

I love How to Be a Person Camp because it creates a structured space to learn life skills that I might not otherwise explicitly teach my kids.

When parents underestimate what our kids are capable of, we inadvertently stifle their development.

But when kids learn age-appropriate “how to be a person” skills, they become better participants in the world and, eventually, better partners to the people they love.