"Camp Character"

The kids may hate this, but we're about to spend some vacation time doing what we are calling "Camp Character".  The summer "Camp" starts on Thursday and lasts about 10 days.  We'll be staying in town and will have some fun at the pool, movies, etc., but we're going to spend perhaps 3 hours a day making a breakthrough in our family dynamics.

We have a 12 year old boy and a 14 year old boy.  We're at the point where they can absorb concepts about assuming responsibility for your life, cultivating a positive attitude, active listening, building trust in relationships, doing the most important things first, etc.  It would be awesome if these types of things became deeply ingrained values, if this could be a common family language and set of principles we could always refer back to and reinforce as the years go by.  This seems like the right time to make a breakthrough.

We're going to do this by working through Sean Covey's book The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens.  In addition to this book, we bought 2 copies (one per kid) of the companion workbook The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens Personal Workbook.  Each day, we'll read a chapter and each child will get through the exercises for that chapter in the Workbook.  We'll discuss what they wrote and our own perspective on the subject.

We're telling the kids that we expect "Camp Character" to make our family act more like a team with much less strife and that it will help them succeed with friendships, school, dating, work, and everything else in life.  I've told them to think of it as similar to the Bar Mitzvah that their friend went through last year.  In a Bar Mitzvah, the boy prepares for the event with hard work and study.  After the ceremony, they are expected to maintain a much higher level of personal responsibility for the rest of their lives.  It is a transformation in what is expected from the boy.  Coincidentally, it happens at age 13, and our boys are right near that age (12 and 14).  So it seems the time is right.