Grown-up “camp people” like me are struggling with this idea.
SlateWhen 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 lake. “They are thinking ‘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. “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. “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.
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