A warm gentle breeze brushes the shore while the afternoon sun glimmers off the lake. A young girl steps off the long ladder and gingerly walks over to peer off the diving tower. Just hours before, she had arrived alongside a hundred other kids to this rustic outpost and now here she is staring down from what might as well be the top of a skyscraper. There’s an adult below on the deck of the wooden raft encouraging her, but she tones them out while she musters the courage to take the leap.
Facing fears and expanding their comfort zones is just one of the many ways children have been learning and developing during the summer since the first camps opened at the end of the 19th century. Today, 26 million children participate at one of over 20,000 day and overnight summer camps operating in the United States. What they take away from these experiences is as important, if not more so, as it was over a century ago.
The labels we use for what children gain through these experiences may have changed over time; from soft skills, to social emotional learning, to character, but the essence remains the same: children are gaining skills and abilities they don’t ordinarily get in school. They acquire tools for success in the immediate as well as those that can be carried forward into adulthood. Key components of this learning are self-awareness, autonomy, social skills, sound judgement, and accountable choices.
Schools are designed around an academic focus emphasizing achievement measured by grades and standardized test scores. Similar to a high level sports coach, educators face immense performance pressure for their classrooms to exceed increasingly higher standards while families attempt to navigate perceived narrow paths to childhood success. There isn’t opportunity in this model for schools to provide the key character building elements of community, problem solving, and objective setting.
Summer, and summer camps specifically, have continuously filled this void. Repeated studies by the American Camp Association (ACA) have illustrated the powerful opportunities the camp experience provides. Consistent feedback from camp professionals, parents, and campers point to significant increases in self-confidence, independence, healthy relationships, leadership, social ease, disciplined thinking, rational decision making, and value acquisition. While camp programming is varied in how they approach this, all camps are rooted in providing this integral service to children.
However, as schools attempt to hit an ever moving target, driven by administrations looking for a global edge and parents wanting to gain every possible advantage, the school calendar has expanded. Instead of doing the difficult work to revamp curriculum, better train educators, and establish developmentally appropriate learning environments school boards believe that just simply adding days in the classroom will make up the difference.
Yet, these schedule shifts are having an adverse effect on the summer experience for children. With constricted summer breaks, camps are forced to shorten sessions, lessen the number of sessions they run, and abbreviate an already condensed program. This leads to less children gaining access to camp and decreased opportunities for children to develop the integral skills afforded by a summer camp experience.
Save Our Summers is a movement to drastically increase awareness of the vital importance for young people of the traditional summer period away from school. This message is led by summer camp professionals and industry leaders from the lens of their being youth development professionals and first hand witnesses to the hugely positive impact the summer camp program has on a child.
Through this effort we can bring balance back to the childhood rhythms that best provide nurturing and development of the whole child. We can guarantee that current and future generations are afforded the opportunities to be properly poised to face an everchanging world. We can ensure that kids continue to be kids. Because at the end of the day, all that positive learning and development happening in the summer is packaged through fun and joy.
The brief terror the girl felt as she left the top of the diving tower was quickly replaced with exuberance as she emerged from the water. She flashed a huge smile as she passed the counselor on the deck on her way back up the ladder for another go.
Brooks Johnson