The Benefits of Summer Camp

Traditional sleepaway camps offer respite from digital overload.

Two of my children are away at camp this week. I dropped them off on Sunday afternoon, helping them carry their backpacks and sleeping bags to rustic little cabins in the woods, where they met the councillors and other kids who will be their companions for the next 6 days. My children were so excited, they barely noticed when I said goodbye. And truth be told, I was excited, too. I adore my children, but it does feel like a vacation when my parental duties decrease by two-thirds!

A traditional summer camp is something that I wish every child could experience. For kids like mine, who are accustomed to a mostly screen-free life in a fairly rural environment, the tech-free camp environment feels like a natural extension of home, but for kids who are used to being immersed in digital media, it can be a profound and revelatory experience to see what offline life can be like.

What Does Summer Camp Offer?

First and foremost, of course, is independence. Young campers are responsible for their own bodies and belongings—getting dressed, brushing their teeth, washing their hands, choosing whether to eat the vegetables on their plates, when to fall asleep. Of course, there are councillors overseeing their actions, but a councillor can only do so much, especially when they’re responsible for a dozen kids. It’s a chance for a child to taste freedom within safe boundaries.

It's also a chance for kids to process their emotions independently. They have to deal with their own feelings and hold complex or conflicting emotions inside, like homesickness, without relying on a parent. This builds resilience and, as days pass, shows the child that they are indeed capable of doing hard things.

Camp promotes the kind of high-quality, in-person interactions that humans are hardwired to crave. No one is on their phones, councillors included, and so everyone is forced to strike up conversations to pass the time, get to know each other, pay attention fully. The cabin itself is a sort of high-stakes social environment where everyone is incentivized to get along because they’re all stuck together for a week; children learn to choose their words carefully and not offend, because no one wants to be ostracized.

There’s a physicality to life at camp that so many children miss out on now. They become acutely aware of their bodies during these days, as they play group games, engage in risky play, and try out new skills like archery and sailing. Kids learn by challenging their bodies, and we adults need to create opportunities for them to do so. Camp, with all its tools and toys and its natural setting, lets them push those limits more readily than at home.

I like thinking about the stories my children are acquiring at camp—stories they’re hearing from others and stories they’re making with new friends. Stories are social glue. They help us as humans to make sense of our place in the world, and we don’t tell enough of them now that we all have phones to suck up our attention. In the past, people told stories to pass the time, which doubled as a powerful teaching tool for children, helping to foster a sense of belonging, of delight, of bonding. I do believe that children are suffering from a lack of storytelling in our world today. My kids will come home from camp full of new stories that they’ll want to share with me (and maybe some that they don’t), and they’ll continue to digest those stories for years to come.

The lack of phones and other digital devices levels the social playing field in a way that schools could learn from. When no one has a flashy new device, nor any way of showing off a highly curated social media presence in hopes of conferring status or “coolness”, every camper is assessed based on what’s immediately visible and perceptible to others. They have no screen or online persona to hide behind. The divide shrinks between the digital “haves” and “have-nots”.

Camp offers a glimpse of the kinds of screen-free spaces we should be striving to create and defend for children in their everyday lives. In my talks on digital minimalism, I call for the normalization of screen-free spaces, where no one (adults and kids alike) is using phones. Schools are an obvious place where this should occur, along with any kind of social club gathering or sports practice. It has to become more normal, even expected, that phones not be used in certain settings, for the benefit of everyone present. In a world that’s currently far from that ideal, camp is a rare and special oasis.

I alluded to my own sense of liberation from parenting, which is important, too. We all need a break sometimes! And even though I still have my oldest child at home (along with a 19-year-old Irish soccer coach whom I agreed to billet for the week, so the house is hardly empty), it feels gratifying to hand over the screen-free parenting to the camp director and councillors for a week, trusting them to do the job that is usually mine. We can’t do this alone; we all need community, and if sending kids to sleepaway camp for a week or two each summer can help, then it’s a great option.

You Might Also Like:

Seventeen Seconds
Consider the Washing Machine
The Art of Family Dinner

---

Thank You, Subscribers!

I’d like to thank the readers who have upgraded recently to paid subscriptions, despite all content remaining free and accessible to all. My dream is for this newsletter to become a self-sustaining project someday, and reader subscriptions are the only way to make that possible.

I also give talks on digital minimalism to schools and community groups of all sizes, so reach out if you’d like me to speak. Learn more on my website.

And if you’ve read my book, Childhood Unplugged, please leave a review on Amazon. It helps to boost visibility and sales. Thank you!

---