On average, I spend roughly three hours a day talking to camper parents. Extrapolate that over the course of three months and I've calculated that, this summer alone, I spent nearly 165 hours (or ~10,000 minutes) listening to an incredibly wide range of complaints. And as my skin has grown much thicker and I've learned not to take it all too personally, I have come to find the following to be entirely true:
You cannot make everyone happy.
So many days I came home from camp feeling like every single one of my helium balloons had been popped. Feeling like nothing we could ever do would be good enough. But mostly, what I learned from this summer is that, at the end of the day, parents love their children and they just want the absolute best for them. And I cannot argue with that.
So I tried to focus on the positive and cherished the handful of times that parents actually called to say something kind or wonderful. The times when they wrote in to say that their child came home so happy and that they cried on the last day of camp because they were so sad it was over!
It's easy to let the bad outweigh the good. But it's important to realize that, in the big picture, there is more good than bad. And we're all doing the best we can.
