On this page we are posting copies of articles that are about camp or camping, the benefits of camp to kids, and other pieces of writting that we feel are worthy of sharing with you. Enjoy. And if you find a good article, please send it along. The articles have not been edited by us, but we may have had to reformat them to fit in our website. We don’t provide direct links because we find that often they change or get broken too easily.

Creating Advantage in College: Summer camp gives children meaningful advantages in college.

(Published on December 2, 2011 by Steve Baskin in “S’mores and More” In Psychology Today’s Website.)

When I started my career as a camp director in 1993, my mother (the “Silver Fox”) shared the following thought with me: “summer camp is like college, but just a little bit early”.

Being a strong believer in my mother’s wisdom, I found myself thinking about this statement fairly often. Summer camp had been a huge part of my personal development as a young man, and had even found its way into my college and graduate school applications. Yet the idea that “camp was like college” did not seem to make sense to me at the time.

Over the past 16 years, I have found that this idea is actually a profound one.

Three years ago, we were talking with a friend whose daughter was in her first year at college. Both mother and daughter had struggled mightily with the separation. “During the first semester, we would talk everyday, sometimes 5 or 6 times. She was so sad and uncomfortable away from home. It really affected her grades and social life. She is better in her second semester, and she only calls once or twice a day. I still worry about her though.”

This conversation reminded me of a speech I heard by Dr Wendy Mogel a few years ago. Dr Mogel is a nationally-known clinical psychologist and educator who wrote the best-seller parenting book “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee”. She shared a story about a good friend of hers whose daughter was a freshman at college at Sarah Lawrence.

Unlike my friend, this woman’s daughter thrived in her first semester in college. She earned exceptional marks (making the Dean’s List) and she became president of the freshman class. During Parents weekend, her mother met the mother of a senior who was president of the entire student body and was weighing various job offers. The two mothers were sharing stories about their daughter’s college experience when the mother of the senior shared an unexpected thought:

“I bet your daughter went to overnight summer camp.”

“She did, but what makes you say that?”

“I am not surprised. I have noticed that my daughter’s friends who had strong freshman years all went to overnight camp at some point. The ones that really struggled did not.”

The contrast of these two freshman experiences (our friends and Wendy’s) compelled me to think about why this might be true. Here is what I came up with.

Going to college presents many challenges, three of which jump out at me:

1. Increased academic rigor (college work is simply harder than high school work)
2. Being away from home and your traditional support system (family, friends, familiar places)
3. Dealing with large amounts of uncertainty (what will classes require, how will I fit in socially, can I deal with this new roommate)

Of course, overnight camp does little to deal with the first challenge of academic rigor, but it helps substantially with both of the other challenges.

Camp helps students adjust to being away-from-home by giving them practice being away-from-home. Campers coming to camp (often as young as Kindergarten or 1st grade) get to experience being separated from home successfully. Certainly, most campers have some homesickness, but the supportive camp community and the fun activities help ease them through this initial challenge. Homesickness is natural. Children will miss their parents.

Further, we live in a society that sometimes suggests to children that they are only safe within eyeshot of their parents. Yet, we parents want our children to grow in confidence and independence so that they can live productive, fulfilling and joyous lives. Camp enables children to experience successful independence. Like college, they are away-from-home. Unlike college, they are in a community committed to their physical and emotional safety.

Camp also helps campers deal with uncertainty. The first week of camp is full of uncertainty: Who are these counselors? What are these traditions? Where do I go? Who will be my friends? Will I be successful? Just like college, there is schedule-related uncertainty (where to go and when) and social uncertainty (who, among this group of relative strangers, will be my friend).

The camper gets to experience overcoming this uncertainty. I like to think of it as strengthening the “resilience muscle.” Having done so, the next experience of uncertainty is easier to handle. The camper who comes to camp for several years gets multiple opportunities to strengthen his or her resilience muscle. By the time they go to college, they are much more confident and resilient.

So the former summer camper arriving at college as a Freshman can focus his or her energy on the challenges of academic rigor, but not worry about being away from home and the uncertainty of a new environment. Other students face all three challenges. Seen this way, it is not hard to understand how camp can help later with college.

Last summer, a long-time camp mom shared her thoughts about her oldest son going out-of-state to college. I asked her how she felt. “I’m going to miss him.”

“Are you worried about his first semester?”

“No way. He has already gone to camp for 9 years, so I know he will be fine. He is so excited to face this challenge. Camp has also helped me – I have had practice being separated from him. He is going to shine at school!”

Later that evening, my wife and I agreed on three things: First, this was one of the nicest endorsements of camp we had heard. Second, we are so happy to think that the campers who have become such an important part of our lives will have an advantage in college. Finally, the “Silver Fox,” once again, was right.

Steve Baskin is an Honor graduate of Davidson College and Harvard Business School. He began his professional career as an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, but chose to leave finance to pursue a career in summer camp and outdoor education. He and his wife Susie are the owner/directors of Camp Champions in central Texas. He is also a co-owner in Camp Pinnacle in North Carolina and Everwood Day Camp in Sharon, Mass. Steve serves as the Treasurer of the American Camp Association and has presented as a speaker at multiple conferences. He believes that the summer camp experience can be the most powerful growth opportunity available to children other than their parents.

Best gift for kids? Send them to summer camp

Published: Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 5:00 AM

By Patriot-News Op-Ed The Patriot-News

By Russell Roeder

I think every parent should figure out a way to get their kid to a sleepaway summer camp. They should go for at least a week (two would be better), and certainly before the child turns 12.

Kids need to get out from under their parents’ wings to spread their own. Whether it’s soccer or baseball or dance lessons or music instruction or karate, our kids spend nearly every waking hour of every day being transported from one highly supervised activity to the next.

As parents, we’ve come to believe that all these structured activities somehow serve the dual purposes of building character and learning about focus and teamwork.

To some extent this is certainly true, but what parents don’t consider is the simple fact that the highly structured and hypercompetitive nature of these activities stifles the most precious and promising elements of childhood: creativity and the joyful freedom to explore, experiment, stumble, recover and succeed on their own terms, and without the unspoken but omnipresent pressure to please us — their parents.

Disagree if you want, but I am pretty sure that if you’re honest you’ll admit that by the time they are 10, every kid has a fairly well-established place in the pecking order of the classroom and school yard. For the 10 percent of kids who are the combination of gregarious, athletic, good looking, funny and smart, this is wonderful. The other 90 percent face the uncertainties of how and where they are going to fit into the increasingly stressful social order.

As well-meaning parents, we do everything we possibly can to get our kids into a better and more competitive position in the social chain by signing them up for all those highly structured activities that we assume will give them a sense of success and bolster their self-esteem.

The problem is that I just don’t think you can manufacture self-esteem in kids. It is a personal discovery. And the more we as parents do to fill their days and structure their lives, the less time and opportunity they have to themselves to find it on their own.

What kids need is a place where they can learn about themselves without the continuous doting eye and well-intentioned judgment of their parents. They need to feel the weird and beautiful exhilaration that comes when you realize you are a stranger among strangers in a safe place and have nothing to lose or prove. You get to discover and be who you really are — not who your schoolmates, teachers and parents expect — or hope you will be.

It doesn’t matter if you’re especially good at soccer or dance or karate. What matters is that you’re willing to cooperate in a group of your peers, find ways to have fun and solve problems and care about the people you are living with. When these are the things that matter, growth and genuine self-esteem follow.

I started going to a summer camp when I was 9. I finished as that camp’s program director when I was 21. It taught me honesty, caring, respect and responsibility. It gave me confidence I never would have discovered in the classroom, school yard or even in the loving home I was blessed to have. It gave me lifelong friendships that have continued to this day (I’m 58). It provided a basis for a long and successful career in the health care industry.

Most importantly, it taught me that collaboration is a more effective way to achieve success than competition. I cite this as the most important lesson of camp because our country is in trouble. We need less competition and more collaboration. We need to get our kids to camp because we need a generation of leaders and citizens who are interested in solving complex problems — not just winning battles.

Christmas is coming. I bet your kid (or grandkids or nieces/nephews) already has a house full of laptops, video game equipment and smartphones. Consider giving them the gift of freedom and discovery. Send your kid to camp next summer.

Russell Roeder of Mechanicsburg is the president of Skipstone Consulting.