Yet Another Classic Teen Experience Is Dying. I Hate the Reason Why.
When I think back to the seven summers I spent at sleepaway camp in Maine, I have mostly sense memories: the sound of screen doors slamming, joyous singing in the dining hall, the scent of pine needles on the path to the (always too cold) lake. Those summers feel dreamy and expansive, full of togetherness and growth.
For kids who go to overnight camp for several weeks or more, it’s a multi-summer experience that typically culminates in a final teenage summer or two—often, the summer after ninth grade or 10th grade—full of special privileges, capstone projects, and sought-after leadership roles. To skip that summer, for Camp People, is to miss the cherry on top, the End of the Era, the coda to the camp experience.
But more and more families today, with college on the brain earlier than ever, are looking at those early teenage summers and reevaluating. The singing, the swimming, the sitting around the campfire may not be enough. “They are thinking [about] ‘how that looks’ on some future college application down the road,” says Corey Dockswell, the director of Camp Wicosuta, a sleepaway camp in New Hampshire, who has been noticing families reconsidering their young teenage kids’ final summers for a number of years.
“Parents will reach out to me and ask about the experience that kids have in the last year at camp—really worried about if it’s ‘a rich enough experience.’ While I don’t think it’s a judgment on camp, I think it’s coming from a place of pressure that’s building earlier and earlier,” Dockswell says. “Pressure from all sides—what parents are hearing, what kids are hearing.”
Another factor, says J.D. Lichtman, the director of Camp Tapawingo, a sleepaway camp in Maine, seems to also be a bit of “pent-up travel bug that is part of the long tail of the pandemic.” (Tapawingo is where I went for many summers as a kid, and where I send my own daughters, who are 10 and 14, so naturally J.D. was one of the first people I called to ask about this issue—especially in light of the conversations I’ve overheard among some of my teenager’s friends lately.)
Lichtman sees kids and families wanting to take more trips—family trips as well as solo enrichment ventures for the kids—which can cut into camp sessions, which may also require a significant time commitment. Social media plays into this, says Lichtman. “Kids see peers posting all these amazing photos from here and there—and then those campers tell me, ‘I saw my friend do this or this thing,’ and that makes them reconsider camp,” Lichtman says.
Chloe (some names have been changed), an 8th grader in New York City who has been attending camp for four weeks every summer since she was 9, says she probably won’t go back after ninth grade: “There are so many other things I should be doing by now, like so many places to travel instead of just being in one place. I want to do a program in Europe next summer.” That “should” is key: For Chloe, it means that her burgeoning ambitions for the future align better, given what she sees in her social context, with something like traveling abroad.
Skipping the final year of camp was the best decision for writer and college admissions consultant Samantha Shanley’s teenagers, who started attending a YMCA camp in New Hampshire in 2015. The time commitment (six weeks) just didn’t work anymore for her son—who chose to do an intense, monthlong NOLS wilderness program that summer—and the generalized program they offered wasn’t challenging enough anymore for his increasingly specific interests in backpacking and survival skills.
Carrie, a mother in Maryland who sent both of her kids to sleepaway camp, considers herself a true Camp Person. “Our kids are under so much pressure all the time and so, for me, giving camp is a gift. It’s a time warp where there are no devices, and they are completely in a bubble—that is such a gift.”
Nevertheless, instead of spending the summer after 10th grade as a counselor-in-training at his beloved camp, this summer her son will be taking classes at a university and doing a brief internship—activities designed to help his college résumé. The motivation for the switch is coming from her kid, says Carrie; he feels that “it’s time for him to do something different and build up a certain narrative on his college app.”
A lot of this handwringing is moot, says Sara Harberson, a college adviser based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “Camp is not a ‘reportable activity,’ but neither are any pay-to-play programs and trips overseas kids may take, or ‘early college’ programs either,” she says. The privilege these programs require is not something you want to highlight in the current admissions climate, she notes, where spotlighting an applicant’s life advantages is not desirable. While they may be entirely fun and educational in their own right—and yes, could lead to amazing experiences that could help a kid hone their interests or “find themselves”—doing these types of activities with an eye to your college app is not advisable, agrees Alexis White (aka Alexis College Expert), a college admissions adviser based in Southern California.
What you do in the summer after ninth grade rarely gets reported on your college application, says Harberson. Some of this is purely pragmatic, she notes, since the Common Application only has room for 10 activities—including school, athletics, music, and community service—and the chance you will even have room to include what you were doing after ninth or 10th grade is slim.
For parents who ask her, “I always say that the summer after ninth is a ‘free summer,’ and even the summer after 10th is not a big deal—it’s really that summer between junior and senior year that you might want to dig into something that interests you in a real and significant way, with a volunteer opportunity or a job,” says Harberson.
Still, if an older high school student wants to spend summer at sleepaway camp and that is enriching to them—especially if it’s in a counselor-in-training role, which offers leadership training—they absolutely should, because you cannot pick every activity with an eye to pleasing a college, says White. “You have to please yourself and feel refreshed and ready to start the new school year. So many of these kids really need a break,” says Harberson.
What is more problematic, however, is this kind of early “summer optimization” overall, says Ruby, a consultant and parent in Portland with a son who will probably start sleepaway camp in a few years. Ruby “lived ten for two” when she was a kid, and now yearns for the freedom of those days. (Despite the fact that most camps no longer run for eight full weeks, this catchphrase, about how much some kids love camp and count down to it all year, has stuck around in some circles.) “Why does everything have to have real-world payoff? Why does everything have to advance you?” says Ruby. “Can’t something just be diddling around because it’s fun? The panic about college choice has made people sort of get hysterical that their kid is going to get left out; if the kid wants to be at camp and dick around with his friends at the lake, go do that! How many more years are you going to not have this much fun? As adults, we spend so much time trying to recapture that lightness and joy that we have at camp.”
Another way to think of it, says Dockswell, is long game versus short game. “To me, the short game is college—and by that, I mean focusing on your summer activities in terms of how they will help your college prospects. The long game, though, is raising a child to be a citizen of the world who is steeped in good values, has learned how to navigate conflict, work as a team, and have resilience.”
To camp fans, that is exactly what happens around the campfire. Free of digital distractions for the first time in a year, the kids fight and make up. They create and collaborate. They forge new friendships and learn how to live with someone who drives them crazy. (College roommate prep!)
There is a pure sense of childhood at camp that allows them to be a kid for a bit longer—and this dichotomy of fun versus future can be confusing for some parents. “The résumé building feels quantitative—I did this program, I went here, here, and here—whereas camp is sort of qualitative,” says Dockswell. But she insists that the skills they are learning at camp at age 13, 14, and 15 are head and shoulders above those from other programs. “If your kid has an internship at 15 in a psych lab, other than being able to say that—are they really developmentally mature enough to absorb what they are doing? They are developmentally ready to learn to work as a team, to handle conflict—the stuff of camp. I can’t take your kids to Spain, but if you want a kid who is resilient and independent and cooperative—I can do that.”
The last year of camp is a true culminating experience, full of key role-modeling for the younger campers, as well as real responsibilities and privileges. “It’s not nothing. It’s not just one more year, it’s the last piece of a puzzle. It’s the end of an experience,” says Dockswell.
There is no endless summer, this much we know. And part of the beauty of summer—no matter how old you are—is how fleeting it truly is. Whatever the boys and girls of summer choose to do, I think as parents we hope it’s full of memories and lessons that last long past college apps.
One central part of Camp Tapawingo lore is that the camp’s name means “Place of Joy.” For me, and now my kids, having that place—even if just in memories—is everything.
