Teens at Camp, Camp and Teens

When TIME magazine ran its cover feature on "Being 13 in America" in the summer of 2005, they wrote about the complex pressures and surprisingly advanced behaviors showing up in many thirteen-year-olds as new phenomena. The good news is that camps serving teenagers have been adapting to these changes and offering increasingly sophisticated program choices to address the challenges teens experience growing up in the shifting world of American culture.

Because of the broad and rather unique educational role camps have in youth development, in particular supervising and interacting close-up with groups of young people away from home often for weeks at a time, camp staff has an immediate perspective on the trends and issues in kids' lives that are only beginning to surface in the larger, cultural parade.

One of the most challenging aspects in helping to raise young adults is how to best guide and support them as they go through the turbulent adolescent years. Recent events have exposed to the public the extent to which modern teens can go if they are left too much to their own devices, and on the positive side, the often boundless energy and idealism which need appropriate nurturing and role modeling to really take hold. Perhaps this has always been true, but good camps know that the consequences of inaction in either direction can make all the difference.

Kids often report that their lives are stressful, socially complex, and they feel pressured to be involved in activities that are for all intents and purposes, beyond the range of where they are developmentally comfortable. The TIME survey found for the first time in our history, the majority of young people interviewed thought the world would be a worse place when they grow up than it is now. Having incidents like September 11 serve as the defining moment in the history of their lives will do things like that. Camp, with its supervised, developmentally appropriate activities may just be one of the antidotes to changing those individual perceptions.

The universal struggles of adolescence—well chronicled in the lives of all of us who survived the struggle of separating from being dependent on our parents to being able to stand on our own in the world—can be hard enough. Adding these other complex and, at times, highly volatile factors to the equation have made the struggle of going through the teen years significantly more challenging, not just for the teens themselves, but for those of us who work with them as well!

Looking for That Something Extra

There is no homework at camp and no grades and thus no need for camp staff to be offering an evaluation that compares one camper against another. This also means staff is free to focus attention consistently on kids' strengths and how to nurture these strengths in ways which build confidence. This is about helping all kids become great, regardless of how far along that path they already are.

Not all camps approach their roles in the lives of young people identically, although on the surface they may sound as if they do. Some camps view their primary role as providing a place for kids to "get away from it all," and these camps focus their programs around fun and recreation. There are many other camps—and more moving in this direction each year—that view summer camp as a place that fulfills the much needed role of teaching kids the kinds of "growing up" skills and vital life lessons which are not taught in schools, yet which are essential for being able to grow up and thrive in the world as adults. These camps organize around the idea that they have the opportunity to be a substantial presence on a young person's journey through childhood into young adulthood, and thus a substantial influence on shaping who they become as adults. These camps generally have a well-defined mission, and their programs reinforce specific values such as personal accountability, responsible decision making, making commitments and following through on them, being a positive team member, and being respectful of others.