10 Reasons Why Your Child Will Love Summer Sleepaway Camp

Introducing your kids to new ideas can be tough. There are good reasons for this. For one, kids with structure in their lives develop better social-emotional health than their peers.

Structure breeds familiarity, which makes new ideas feel like threats. This is true even when the new idea is something exciting, like the prospect of going to summer camp. Certainly, there are benefits to attending sleepaway camp that make it worth interrupting those precious routines, right?

There are! Once your child sees the reasons why summer camp can be so exciting, they’ll jump at the chance to go as soon as summer rolls around.

Let us help you convince them. What follows are 10 of the best reasons we can think of to attend summer camp. Keep reading to find the benefits that will best build your case.

10 Benefits to Attending Summer Camp

Socialization is a huge part of the summer camp experience, but it’s not even close to the only benefit to attending a camp. We’ve cast our net wide to include reasons from the fields of technology, biology, psychology, and just plain fun.

You’ll no doubt be able to come up with some of these on your own, but others may be unfamiliar, especially if your own camping days are long behind you. Read on, and refamiliarize yourself with the pleasure of camp!

1. They Will Make Friends for Life

If all that came of summer camp were the friends, there would be plenty of reason to go. Calling camp friends “just” one reason to go to sleepaway camp is like saying your heart is “just” one organ in your body. The whole experience falls apart without them!

Friendships form quickly at camp because of the close quarters and abundance of opportunities for bonding. It’s hard to stay strangers with people you see at the outhouse every day.

Not only are camp friendships fast to form, they can last for decades. By going to camp, your child won’t just be making friends for a summer. They will be building the foundation for a life of connections.

2. Their Looks Don’t Matter

It’s hard to stay glamorous at camp for long. There are too few grooming tools, too much sweat, and too many days spent traversing the wilderness to worry about appearances.

This is freeing for kids. They spend so much of their lives in school and their other communities worrying about how they fit in. Appearance is a huge part of that.

With freedom from these worries comes a confidence that will serve your children well when they return to their lives back home.

3. They Will Encounter Diverse Perspectives

When you pick the right camp, the other campers will come from all over the United States and perhaps even the world. Exposure to different cultures and backgrounds early on can help your children develop empathy, an essential quality in today’s world.

4. They Can Explore and Express Themselves

The freedom, friendships, and diverse perspectives that come with camp make for a supportive environment in which your children can be themselves. Not only can they be themselves, but they can also learn who they are in the first place.

5. The Outdoors

Your children spend about half the time you did playing outside. That makes playing outside a dying art form. Camp is the perfect place to rekindle this practice.

“Nature deficit disorder” is not a clinical diagnosis, but the concept it represents is relevant. There are innumerable benefits to spending time outdoors that a child just can’t experience in front of a screen.

If the social aspects of camp help children explore their identities, the natural aspects help them explore their environments.

6. They Will Accumulate New Experiences

If playing outside isn’t foreign enough, there are dozens of other camp activities that are just as exciting for kids. Structured classes in crafts, physical activity, and life skills all help kids discover talents they may not have known they had.

7. They Will Have Opportunities to Develop Independence

If your child is anxious about attending sleepaway camp, you can ease their mind by letting them know it won’t be made up entirely of structured group activities. Any camp worth its salt will incorporate time during the day to make sure kids have the opportunities they need to develop relationships and leadership skills during the summer.

8. They Have to Ditch Their Phones

This might seem like a drawback, but after the first few hours or days of withdrawal, your kids will love the fact that they can’t be attached to their phones at summer sleepaway camp.

Most children now don’t know a life without a phone or any number of other screens. Taking these away for most of the day allows them to engage with the world in ways that are novel to them.

9. They Will Learn Essential Life Skills

Every kid who attends summer camp year after year looks forward to that year when they make the transition from camper to counselor. That’s because leadership skills are instilled in campers, and they long to practice them.

Kids who attend sleepaway camp also get ample opportunities to practice collaboration, thanks to classes and pleasant competitive challenges. Think tug of war.

Just as good as leadership and cooperation is the fact that kids take responsibility for cleaning up their own messes at sleepaway camp. That’s a benefit to you upon their return.

10. They Will Make Memories for a Lifetime

There’s a reason so many movies are made about summer camp. It’s a particularly magical time in a kid’s life. The activities, the friendships, the sunsets, and campfires all make for unforgettable memories.

Fall In Love With Camp

After reading the reasons for attending summer camp, you might feel like you’d be depriving your kid if you didn’t offer them this indelible experience. That just might be! Summer camp can be the highlight of a child’s whole year.

To start planning your child or teenager’s summer camp experience, request your free information from our camp experts now.

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