Camping: A Tool For Strong Family Relationships

Camping holds our family together. We do a lot of things as a family and it is usually involves going our separate ways. We come together to sleep, eat and shower and then we are off again. Through out these growing up years for the kids I have always maintained it was essential that we find some way in our busy lifestyle to reconnect and spend some quality time and about 5 years ago when the kids were in grade school we discovered camping. It was actually an accident because I would never have chosen of my own accord to go without basic necessities at that time in my life but we were kinda forced into it by a family reunion. You see the matriarch in our family decided because of the cost of getting together for all her off spring and her offsprings offspring that we would make this family reunion a camping adventure. An adventure was exactly what it was, the likes of which the world has never seen up to that point and will likely never see again. Try putting 27 independent people from 7 autonomous families in one camp ground when all the decisions have to be made by committee. Well I will not bore you with the details but lets just say that the majority of the 3 days we spent doing three things. One was eating, two was sleeping and the third thing was trying to decide what else we were going to do and they corralling the group together into vehicles to go do whatever it was we decided to do. Here is the reason I think this all worked for our family and the reason I think it works in so many cases. It has to do with common experience and working our problems out together. When you go for a typical weekend away or a vacation we here in the US often will divide our time as a group between group time and individual time. In a camping situation there is no individual time. You / We are forced to be exposed to each other for the entire time the adventure is taking place. This strains any relationship and it will force a tension that will ultimately bond you together if it does not break you apart. As an aside this works assuming there is some sort of bond to start with. A new relationship or one that is weak may be destroyed if it does not have the seeds for greatness. Assuming that it does, the relationship is often strengthened by the tension since like any muscle when it is worked it gets stronger. Back to the contrasting vacation where we are all staying in a hotel and separate rooms, we can always escape and can for the most part avoid the tension that forces us to deal with each other while camping. After our family reunion and the resulting posturing, alliance building and politicking that happened for those three days we came out on the other side a stronger unit because we knew that no matter what happened we could work it out and we knew that we would all choose to love each other and support each other in spite of our differences. And that is why camping has become this familys foray into relationship building disguised as a family get away or vacation. Cheap fun with a anterior motive.

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