Skip School and Go to Camp

Summer camp is very popular in Canada. The country’s voyageur founders still loom large in the public consciousness, so many families that can afford it send their children into the wilderness with canoe paddles for weeks, or even months, in the summer. I see enormous changes in my own kids when they return from a month away from me, and I think that says more about the benefits of camping than the burdens of my parenting style. So I was surprised to find when we moved from Toronto to a demographically similar community in New York that it’s relatively uncommon for kids to go to sleepaway camp. Why is that? And are kids missing out?

One reason seems to be that families start thinking about college, and credentialing, at the start of ninth grade or even earlier. Kids in affluent communities customarily spend 30-35 hours a week in school, and 40-50 hours a week on extracurriculars and homework. For many, the race to exclusive colleges has supplanted all other activities, including free time with friends. Remember those lazy afternoons hanging out watching tv in high school? Or lying on the floor with your best friend solving the problems of the world? Or sneaking beers and hiding out from parents and police in the woods near your school? Mostly gone. 

Summer has also fallen victim to the college craze. For many kids, especially from communities like my own, day camps, and summer jobs, and especially sleepaway camps have been replaced by resume-building academic camps, application-boosting internships and related activities. For some kids, this is a great opportunity to dive deeper into an area that they love. But for most, it’s a open window of time where they can credential-build, unlimited by the pesky time constraints of school and schoolwork. As an aside, the sad truth is that very few of these programs are even rewarded in the college admissions process. For one, most of them have low bars to entry, are not terribly rigorous and are merely “pay to play”. Relatedly, they are often expensive, and therefore serve mostly as signalers of a teen’s family’s socioeconomic status.

Is there something else holding back our Americans from sending their kids away for the summer? I’ve talked to people who have concerns about safety. Although valid, these concerns always strike me as a little abstracted. I haven’t heard many stories of kids having serious problems at camp, but I do know of more successful summer camp experiences than I can count. I think it’s probably more of a lawnmower parent issue. We are so accustomed to micro-managing the details of our children’s lives - and smoothing out every bump in the grass - that we can’t imagine them being away from us for a minute, much less a month. We rationalize it as fear for their safety, but really it’s about control. Heaven forbid our kids drink kool-aid with every meal, and eat sugar straight from the package and forgo showering for sixteen straight days. All of which my kids have done, proudly.

This is exactly why kids should go away to summer camp. There’s no one formula for what makes it valuable, other than that it’s time away from parents, where most of the authority figures are really just kids themselves. There is structure, but a lot of freedom. Kids wake up in the morning and dress themselves and tidy their cabins. They decide whether (or not) to brush their teeth and shower. And they manage their social successes and failures on their own. To be sure, camp is not for everyone. But for most kids, it is a joy. My kids come home from camp with a calm aura that is otherwise totally alien in our house of three bouncy boys. They look adults in the eye and shake their hands. They put away their laundry. And they spend hours reporting to us on their juvenile hijinks in the woods and on the lakes. Unfortunately, reality sets in after a few weeks at home. Back to the grind, it’s like they’ve never been away at all.  

Here’s another compelling reason to send kids away to an old-school traditional summer camp: we as a society have become terrible at unstructured free time. Life as an adult can be very hard, and stressful, and exhausting. Our kids only have two decades before the reality of the rest of their lives sets in. There was a great article in The New York Times a few months ago called “In Praise of Mediocrity” (Tim Wu). It argued that these days most adults don’t have hobbies, which are activities done for pleasure with little purpose. We don’t jog, we train. We don’t do crossword puzzles for the joy of it, we do them to protect our brains from dementia. For many of us childhood is the last time that life can be consumed with pleasure, and little purpose. To me, that’s what camp is all about. I regret not being more of a camper when I was a kid, and those were much less stressful times for growing up. These days, it makes we wonder whether my kids would be better off at camp during the school year, and at school during the summer.