Each summer, parents across the country take a leap of faith by sending their child off to summer camp, thus entrusting their health and safety to people they may not even know.  This new, and timely, article from the May/June edition of Camping Magazine discusses the camp counselor’s role as a summer “parent” – or in loco parentis.

CCSC has long believed that the summer camp experience offers significant opportunities to help children and young adults learn leadership skills that transfer well into other settings, such as school and athletics.  With our teen population in particular, we are quite intentional about demonstrating and encouraging leadership.  The new edition of Camping Magazine from the American Camp Association contains a feature article, Indifferent Spectators, on leadership that was co-written by three of our campers.

In this space, we have posted a number of articles discussing the all-important issue of bullying.  As the summer camp season approaches, now is a good time to start thinking about how best to help children disconnect from social media.  In Cyberbullying and Camp’s Role in Helping Girls Disengage from the Online World, author Rachel Simmons discusses how girls in particular use the interned to engage in bullying behaviors and how camp can help them to stop.

Kids tell us that camp is a place where they can “be themselves” without fear of failure or ridicule by adults or peers.  That is certainly the type of environment – and community – we strive to create each summer.  And that’s a good thing, because we now have a growing body of research and practice that suggests making mistakes is an essential component of learning for children.  Some of that work is discussed in Mistakes Improve Children’s Learning by Marilyn Price-Mitchell in Psychology Today.

While there are many aspects of the summer camp experience that will influence a child’s enjoyment, one of the bigger pieces is the program offerings they choose.  A new article on our site advises parents as to what questions they might consider asking when choosing a camp!

Here’s an excerpt:

When parents leave their children at camp, they experience a multitude of concerns. Will they be homesick? Will they make friends? Will the counselors take care of them? And naturally, they wonder what their children will do all day. The camp’s program often proves to be one of the most significant aspects of a campers’ experience and can often be a determining factor when parents decide whether to send their children back the following summer. Read more …

While we’ve known anecdotally for generations that summer camp helps kids to feel better about themselves and more confident with others, recent research from the American Camp Association proves it!  Indeed, ACA REPORT- Directions: Youth Development Outcomes of the Camp Experience lists self-esteem and confidence among five benefits young people receive from time at camp.  The others are:

• social skills and making friends
• independence and leadership qualities
• willingness to try and adventurousness
• spiritual grwoth, especially at camps focused on spirituality.

Of course, camp is only part of the answer.  There are many things parents can do to help with their child’s self-esteem and level of confidence.  An article from KidsHealth, Raising Confident Kids, discusses some of them.

One of the goals of the summer camp experience is to help children to live more independently and develop social skills.  Part of that process, just like at home, is internalizing values and manners – something many parents struggle to instill in their offspring.  In Raise a Kid Who Gets Invited Back, Teri Cetinna tackles this subject for Parenting.com.

Father-son relationships are often discussed and debated. Yet, arguably, one of the most potent relationships a growing boy will have is with his mother.  Those relationships are not always easily understood or may be mis-perceived.  Kate Stone Lombardi discusses this topic in a Wall Street Journal article, Who Are You Calling a Mama’s Boy?

At last month’s American Camp Association conference in Atlanta, GA there was continued discussion about new evidence supporting unstructured (not the same as unsupervised) play among children, including at summer camp!  The Joys of Doing Nothing, on Scholastic.com outlines some of what we know.

Positive youth development is the name of the game.  In “Keys to Quality Youth Development,” the University of Michigan point to the work of Gisela Konopka and Karen Pittman in identifying eight critical elements essential to such development.  We think you’ll recognize a lot of them from camp!