The article "Looking Forward to a VISIONS Summer" offers thoughts for participants to ponder before departure day. As parents of children not long out of their teens (one who just turned 20 on May 28) may we offer thoughts for you, the parents, to ponder before your child departs?

VISIONS, along with other summer programs, camp consultants and referral professionals, notices the recent rise in the number of parents wanting to know what their children are doing every few days, sometimes even daily during their programs. This desire is understandable when our children go away, first to a summer camp and especially later to more distant places without us. Our teenagers have opportunities to travel and to experience things we never imagined. In this regard, theirs is a different world from the one in which we, their parents, were adolescents.

There are camps and other kinds of summer programs that post daily updates from the field on their websites so that families can stay current, can even see what their children are doing daily. On some trips the participants have daily e-mail access. VISIONS intentionally is not such a program. We're always happy to tell you what's going on when you call or e-mail us. And we're available any day or night for emergencies or urgent messages. Kids have time once a week to call or, at some sites, e-mail home. Our leaders always allow time at the airport for participants to call home to confirm arrival. Apart from these protocols, we do not bring the program experience back home to you in real or close to real time on a frequent basis via the internet. While it unfolds, we want VISIONS to be your child's experience and your child's alone with the other participants, staff, and the host community.

VISIONS can be a powerful stepping stone to independence. Awareness of oneself in reaction to and relationship with the world is fundamental to healthy independence. By independence we do not mean freedom to wander the host community at will, to be gone from the group for hours during the day or night so long as one is back by the designated time or to opt out of work projects for part or all of the day. VISIONS programs challenge participants intrinsically on many levels by encouraging the whole self to step out and into a safe community with others who share a common goal.

Daily life in VISIONS is just that - life lived every day...working, socializing with our hosts and among ourselves, exploring and discovering together. A stream of spontaneous yet thoughtful activity, which, when posted on a computer, might look...well...boring at times. VISIONS at its heart is the rhythm and flow of minutes and hours. While we take excursions to historic places and beautiful spaces, witness powerful ceremonies or joyful celebrations, these are weekend events. For the most part, our days are 'uneventful'. And yet, they are not uneventful in the least.

At home VISIONS participants digest hordes of information via computer and in school. They learn to memorize and recite facts, how to reason, argue and debate. VISIONS is the vital counterpoint, we believe, to all this information and interpretation. Experience is the thing. The melding of mind, muscles, heart, and psyche in, ostensibly, uneventful everyday life. Participants dive into a very new, very different, very rich life stream. We want their focus every moment.

While VISIONS programs have circle meetings a few nights weekly, this is a time for us to come together to affirm a shared experience; it is not a forum for interpretation or intellectualizing. The time for interpretation will come after the program. Daily or every-other-day calls to family and friends back home potentially can pull kids out of their new aesthetic realm with its promise and reward of deep learning.

Literally hundreds of parents have written us over the years to tell about the changes they saw and felt in their children after a VISIONS program. Nearly 20 years of such affirming feedback makes us confident that you'll learn the most important things about your child's experience when s/he comes home.

So, we ask that you ponder this in preparing for your child's VISIONS program. Try to be at ease and patient with a weekly phone call from the field. Try to balance the understandable desire to know what's going on 'now' with the reward you'll receive when your child returns home a bit more independent, more confident and with wonderful stories he or she will be eager to share.

Joanne Pinaire & Teena Beutel
VISIONS Directors