For Boys, Kooch-i-ching Offers an Alternative World

By Torie Ludwin

After a month of scanning the Kooch-i-ching photo galleries and rifling through our mail for letters, my husband and I took a long flight, followed by an even longer drive, to the top of Minnesota to pick up our middle school boys from camp.

It was not only their first year as campers, but also ours as parents. And while we had some sense of what camp looked like from the website, we didn’t really have a sense of what it would be like. One hundred and twenty boys on one island could be many different things.

Juniors bond during an afternoon activity. (Kate Downey)

“Everything was humming: kids finding what they wanted to do and doing it, kids knowing where they wanted to go and going there. The independence was palpable.”

During our visit, we were able to experience, if only for a few days, the outstanding culture cultivated at Kooch-i-ching. I was stunned, frankly. And I am deeply, deeply grateful. The boys, the counselors, the adult leaders were friendly, open, helpful, supportive. They knew my boys by name, they could look me in the eye, they could talk about my kids in knowledgeable ways. My experiences with middle- school boys—and, to some extent, young men in general— is that they are not uniformly like this. And yet at Kooch, this was the norm.

Stepping onto the island for the first time, I felt like I was visiting somewhere where the rules were not of my knowing. Everything was humming: kids finding what they wanted to do and doing it, kids knowing where they wanted to go and going there. The independence was palpable.

This environment was all the more surprising to me having been recently exposed to the behavior of middle-school boys, who run hot and cold, say horrible things about each other on social media, shove people out of social circles, use bad language, and try on, for the first time, their idea of “masculinity.”

It’s not easy being a middle-school boy. These behaviors and attitudes are not what I want my boys to absorb.

Thus, my total wonder and extraordinary gratitude for Kooch-i-ching and the opportunity for my boys to see that yes, men can be strong without bullying, friendly without jerking the rug out from under one another, helpful without expecting payback, and caring toward others without being made fun of. What an excellent environment for my children to grow and learn in.

Kooch-i-ching is a place where boys can learn by doing, and by modeling the behavior of young men showing the best characteristics of humankind.

This article was originally published in the Fall 2019 issue of the Kooch-i-ching Tumpline.