How millennials ruined summer camp

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Summer camp is supposed to be fun.

It’s a place for swimming, crafts, new friendships, and learning repetitive songs that will annoy your family members well into September. What’s not to like?

A lot, apparently. One big reason parents are letting their children “rot” at home this summer, according to the New York Times, is that kids complain so much about going to camp.

Of course, kids have always whined about doing stuff, even stuff they basically like. But one reader, Juliana, wrote to me recently that while she enjoyed day camp as a child, “my kid tells us every day he doesn’t want to go back.” Is it possible that camp is just worse now?

It’s definitely different. Experts and parents alike report a shift towards ever more specialized camps — focused on everything from coding to urban farming — and toward shorter, 1- or 2-week sessions rather than camps that run the full summer. While these changes can give families more flexibility and kids a chance to pursue their interests, they can also make it more challenging to form friendships and turn camp into an extension of the high-pressure environment many kids already face during the school year.

I can’t say definitively whether camp is less fun than it used to be, but I did come away from my reporting with a better understanding of what kids get out of camp, what adults want them to get, and why the two don’t always match up.

Summer camp in America started in the 19th century as a response to anxieties about urbanization and its effects on boys and young men. One early camp founder, Ernest Balch, complained about “the miserable condition of boys from well-to-do families in the summer hotels,” starting his camp so that boys would have to learn to fend for themselves in nature.

Early camps emphasized the character-building powers of the wilderness. As one brochure put it, “A camp in the woods bordering on a beautiful lake, breathing the healthful, bracing air of the pines, viewing Nature in her ever-changing moods, living a free, outdoor life, and having at all times the sympathetic companionship of young men of refinement, experience, and character — is this not the ideal summer outing for a boy?”

Soon, settlement houses began sponsoring camps for urban youth from poor families, and by the 1920s, camp was becoming more common across social classes, said Michael Smith, a history professor at Ithaca College who has studied summer camps. While early camps had been sleepaway camps, more day camps sprang up in the 1960s and ’70s as more mothers joined the workforce and families needed summer child care.

These camps were often generalized in their programming, offering activities like crafts and swimming. But in the late 20th century, camps started to become more specialized, focusing on single topics like sports, computers, or space rather than lanyards and nature walks. The shift may have been driven by families who wanted their kids to practice a specific skill at camp, rather than simply getting a taste of the outdoors, Smith said.

Some camps also saw a demand for a more academic environment as anxiety around college admissions ramped up. Hollie Kissler, the director of a Portland, Oregon, day camp told Bloomberg that around 2001, parents started asking for worksheets and reading logs at camp. Campers then would have been millennials, the generation sending their kids to camp (and influencing camp offerings) today.

Meanwhile, with families juggling more complicated summer schedules, more parents wanted the option of shorter camps for their kids. “Even camps that used to have a nine-week schedule increasingly considered moving to a two-session schedule,” Leslie Paris, author of the book Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp, told Vox earlier this summer.

Today, the most common session length is one week, Henry DeHart, interim president and CEO of the American Camp Association, told me.

Some fear that the trend toward shorter sessions could make it harder for campers to form friendships. Juliana, the reader who wrote to me, wondered if 1-week blocks might be less “conducive to building community or finding your place at camp, since the cohort changes every week.”

When it comes to positive developmental outcomes for kids, like building social skills and perseverance, research by the American Camp Association has shown that session length doesn’t matter, DeHart said. Still, “there’s no doubt, if you have more time with folks, you can develop deeper relationships.”

The trend toward specialization also has pros and cons, experts and families say. Niche camps allow kids to delve into their interests. “My daughter loves ceramics and is very excited about her one week ceramics camp,” Melinda Wenner Moyer, a journalist and author who has written about camp, told me in an email.

There are also dedicated camps for neurodivergent kids and children with disabilities, who aren’t always well-served by traditional camps. Some groups even offer camps for kids who have been through particular traumatic experiences, like being burned or losing a family member, DeHart said.

But when special camps are too academic or parent-driven, they can be detrimental, some say. “I worry a little about kids who are enrolled in specialized camps because their parents want them to develop or master a particular skill,” Wenner Moyer said. “Kids today say they often feel pressured by their parents to excel and achieve, which is not healthy for their self-esteem.”

Going to camp to bolster your future college application might be less fun than, say, splashing around in a lake. If camps have become more pre-professional than they used to be, maybe it’s no surprise that kids are dragging their feet about attending.

On the other hand, maybe fun has never been central to the premise of camp. Whether it’s shoring up 19th-century boys’ supposedly flagging masculinity or preparing kids for the rat race of late capitalism, camp has always been more about adult anxieties than about what kids actually want to do.

Even the most traditional wilderness-based camps, Smith points out, were often a huge culture shock for city kids. Possibly the most famous song about camp, the 1963 classic “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” is about a camp rife with poison ivy, foodborne illness, and malaria.

In fact, it’s possible that fun has always been a byproduct of camp, something kids wrest from whatever structure adults try to impose upon them. The day camp I attended throughout my childhood focused on more traditional camp activities when I was a little kid (swimming, stick-gathering, arguing). But when I was around 10, it became more specialized — whether that was due to changing times or simply different programming for different age groups, I’m not sure.

I ended up in “video camp,” during which we used camcorders to make our own short films. I’m pretty sure we were supposed to produce G-rated content, but every single movie the campers made was about murder, including our group’s masterpiece, the vaguely Terminator-inspired slasher flick Death Four Times Over.

The following session, we were informed that no more onscreen violence would be allowed, and each film would have to have a morally uplifting message. But the damage was done. It was the most fun I ever had.