Why Your Child Needs Camp to Be Successful in the 21st Century

SPONSORED: While camp is about playing sports, making new friends and learning to swim, it’s so much more than that.  Camp allows children to gain important life skills that truly can’t be learned in any other environment.  School is an important learning environment for reading, writing, and arithmetic, but camp is where a child’s social education takes place and where children learn transferable skills that 21st-century employers are looking for in future employees.   Here are just a few of the skills children gain at summer camp.

Communication – Camp is one of the last unplugged environments for children, where there is no snapchat, fortnite and Instagram to distract children. Instead, they are outside in nature, interacting with their peers, having meaningful conversations and communicating face to face instead of screen to screen.

Critical Thinking – From choosing their own elective activities to developing their own projects in arts & crafts to navigating social situations in their bunk, campers are learning about the world around them and figuring things out for themselves in a safe and nurturing environment.

Self-Reliance – Today’s children are more tethered to their parents than any other generation before.  Rarely are decisions made without a text to mom and dad.  Without parents around, children learn to rely on their own at camp, allowing them to gain independence and to trust their own instincts.

Teamwork – Camp is a community where campers and staff work together, whether it’s on the field, creating songs for an all-camp competition, building a camp fire or cleaning up the bunk in the morning before activities.  Children feel part of a community and learn to get along with other children that are different than themselves.

Flexibility & adaptability – At camp, children are taken out of their comfort zone of home life and learn to adapt to a new community, new friends and at overnight camp, a new living environment.  These changes make children more adaptable and flexible.

Grit & resilience –Whether it’s not liking camp the first few days and getting over the homesickness by the end of the week or being too scared to go down the zipline at first, experiencing adversity helps children build resilience and grit, skills that children will need in life to become successful adults.

This post was sponsored by American Camp Association, NY & NJ. If you would like to reach our readers, please contact us.