Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Duncan

There’s a neat cruelty tucked into Raymond Duncan’s line: it frames summer camp not as a rite of passage for kids, but as a logistical solution for adults. The verb choice does the work. “Pack up” evokes suitcases, containment, the fantasy that problems can be zippered shut and shipped elsewhere. “Send them off” lands like mail, or exile. And by calling children “their troubles,” Duncan doesn’t just accuse parents of impatience; he implicates a culture that treats childcare as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a relationship to be lived.

The joke is economical, but the subtext is broader than a one-liner about bad moms and dads. It’s an indictment of respectability: the way middle-class institutions absorb private strain and return a polished narrative. Summer camp becomes social alchemy, turning family friction, marital exhaustion, and restless kids into “healthy” independence. Duncan’s cynicism points to the transaction underneath the wholesome veneer: pay a fee, outsource the chaos, reclaim a version of adult life unbothered by the daily evidence of your own limitations.

Context matters. Duncan lived through the rise of modern consumer life and professionalized child-rearing, when leisure industries and “character-building” programs sold not only experiences to children but relief to parents. The line survives because it punctures a still-familiar script: we don’t always admit what we’re buying when we buy care. The sting is that he’s probably right often enough to be funny.