" .
Camp ends at 3 p.m., but McCarthy is cheered to hear many children tell their parents to fetch them at four. They do this for a reason that's notable in an era marked by the playdate, the proliferation of elite travel teams and the fear parents have of leaving their children unsupervised. It turns out that many campers want to play stickball.
McCarthy has spent a lot of time insinuating himself into the heads of 10-year-olds. "They aren't yet set in their ways, so they'll absorb a lot," he says. "They're the most popular group to coach. If I want to get my batteries recharged, I go hit fungoes to the 10-year-olds.".
There's a crossroads quality to being 10. The hormone-fired moods of adolescence are still a ways off, but innocence is yielding to budding sophistication. Ten-year-olds know how babies are made, but they won't necessarily let on that they know. It's by 10 that kids have a fully developed conscience, not just to guide their own behavior, but also to serve as a matrix into which the particulars of the world around them fit. "That's not fair," is a classic 10-year-old's declaration, whether uttered to a playmate or to Mom after a sibling has gotten away with something. ("That's unfair," Emma Eddy, a 10-year-old soccer player in Hinesburg, Vt., said recently upon learning that the WUSA had folded. "They should have a girls' league too. I need some sports to play when I get older. I mean, do I want to play, like, golf?").
Though fourth- and fifth-graders typically stand less than five feet tall and weigh less than 100 pounds, you can have a startlingly high-level conversation with them, during which you're likely to learn what they unabashedly love: to be praised; to be asked their opinion and tell you what they know; to belong, be it to clubs or teams or other groups; and to hear true stories, not just made-up ones. If 10 is the time to step out in the world, Mark Twain captured the age perfectly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on Twain's own recollections of that period of his life.
