The Beginning

Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it ... and change it as times change ... cannot think new thoughts.

— Salman Rushdie

It was the fall of 1989. I was sitting in my car waiting to pick up my daughter from school. San Francisco University High School, known as "University," was private and highly selective, admission a sought-after prize. We were one of the few "middle class" families. Except for the students on full scholarships, more than 80 percent of the rest were from affluent backgrounds.

As I waited, I saw a tall and very thin African American student standing by the front door. I knew his name was De'Mondre and that he was there on a scholarship because he shared some classes with my youngest daughter, who was in her senior year. As teenagers streamed by, De'Mondre looked into their faces and called out hellos. Although I couldn't hear his voice, the discomfort evident in his body and gestures was painful to watch. The students politely returned his greetings, but no one stayed to talk. He remained standing alone.

I immediately sympathized with his awkwardness. As a teenager growing up on a farm in Indiana, I often felt like an outsider. And it had been hard to watch my own three children lose confidence as they tried to fit into the privileged, cosmopolitan culture of this high school. We lived in a rural area called West Marin, an hour's drive and a world away from the wealthy community of Pacific Heights. Coming from a small under-resourced public grade school, they, like many of the scholarship students at University, were not as academically prepared as their more privileged peers, the majority of whom had attended private schools for most of their lives. Only years later would my kids talk about how awkward and inadequate this made them feel. At the time, I only knew they were struggling.

To help our children cope during this difficult transition, my husband and I borrowed money from his mother to send them to summer programs away from home. It began with sleep-away camps in middle school. During adolescence we found more ambitious and challenging opportunities. After their freshman year, for example, each one of them participated in a three-week mountaineering and white-water rafting trip in Oregon with Outward Bound.

Our son continued to build his confidence the following summer on a difficult wilderness expedition through the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Wyoming. After his junior year, he participated in a community service program in the mountains of Haiti, an experience that shaped his character and values and helped him gain a much broader view of the world.

Our middle daughter was sensitive, with an artistic side. Sandwiched between two athletic and competitive siblings, she learned early on to say, "I can't," and to give in to her many fears: heights, the dark, and extending herself athletically. The idea of going on Outward Bound or any kind of wilderness program was anathema to her. We told her she had a choice: she could go voluntarily or involuntarily. She chose to go involuntarily. I still remember that angry silent drive to the airport.

She returned with a new name, "Sara Can!" The following summer she attended a highly challenging drama program at Oxford University. Today Sara Can is a working actress in Los Angeles.

Our extroverted and competitive youngest daughter found her Outward Bound experience easy. The next summer however was different. She struggled through a lonely and challenging horseback riding program with a critical coach in England.

Even with the ups and downs that all three faced, those rigorous adventures had the intended effect, which I began to call, "going for hard." By making hard choices in places where no one knew them, my children had the chance to stretch themselves and experiment with different identities. They learned to retell and then rewrite their stories, as well as to regain the confidence they had lost as a result of feeling so inadequate and academically behind in school.

I wouldn't have used these words at the time, but participating in these summer programs also increased my children's "self-efficacy." Self-efficacy is the belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations. People with high self-efficacy — that is, those who believe they can perform well — are more likely to view difficult tasks as something to be mastered rather than something to be avoided. Research also shows that people who approach challenges with what Carol Dweck calls a "growth mindset" — the belief that they can change and grow through application and experience — have much better long-term outcomes.

During the physical, emotional, and intellectual explosions of the adolescent years, developing self-efficacy and a growth mindset is critical for teenagers' identity formation and healthy outcomes as adults. As Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who did pioneering research on self-efficacy notes, "Adolescents expand and strengthen their sense of efficacy by learning how to deal successfully with challenges." Completing a lengthy wilderness expedition of three weeks or longer can make almost anyone believe they can — that they are, indeed, strong enough to do anything.

Summer wilderness programs not only increased my children's efficacy, but they also helped them develop agency — the opportunity to act on one's behalf. They hiked six miles a day while toting a 60-pound backpack, learned to navigate using maps, and to speak up in intimate group conversations, all the while continuing to challenge themselves to master other new skills and new ideas. The choices they were constantly making mattered, the consequences of which they could see immediately. Back at school, their renewed self-efficacy and agency gave them a new sense of balance; they could see their academic deficiencies as well as possibilities with a much broader perspective.

Sitting in my worn Volkswagen on that day in front of school, watching that lonely boy, a thought began to form in my mind: What if he had the chance to go on a summer trip? That was the beginning, the first moment I caught a glimmer of something. The thought flew out of my head as my daughter, Mara, came bounding outside, waving and eager to get home.

Mara graduated and went on to college like her older siblings, but the image of De'Mondre returned along with the thought, Why not a summer program for him? A year later I started a small nonprofit organization to offer summer experiences my own children had found so helpful to low-income students. I decided to call it Summer Search.

For most of my life, in my different roles as student, nurse, wife, mother, and a counselor in private practice, I tended to define myself through...