When did summer camp become vocational school for children?
‘Techno-tainment’ by the campfire
Waking up to a friendly trumpet, rolling out of the top bunk toward mess hall with a legion of other campers. After some eggs and toast, heading for a nature hike, then scrambling to the crafts table for a lesson in friendship bracelets. After lunch and canoeing, a campfire canoodle with your crush under the stars.
It’s the cliché, idyllic vision of summer camp we’ve seen represented in pop culture since the 1950s.
Now peek at the FAQ page from Planet Bravo’s “Techno-tainment” camp, a summer youth enrichment program offered in Beverly Hills, California, which teaches everything from coding to video game design for grades 2–9:
Q: I noticed your camps run 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Isn’t that a long day?
A: You would think so, right? In fact, most students would say the day is not long enough at camp….We like to tell the campers this is just like a real work day (8 hours), and it seems to get them excited about entering the work force someday!
The questions sound like the conscience of a guilty parent dropping his kid off at a desk job. The answers contain lots of exclamation points.
Q: Do the children only work on the computers all day?
A: No way! It’s summer!
Meredith Small says the anxieties and burnout felt by adults at work are translating to kids, even during presumed times of rest like summer camp.
“America is not child-friendly,” says Small, professor of anthropology at Cornell and author of Our Babies, Ourselves. “We model our parenting after how we work. We tell kids, ‘Great job!’ What a stupid thing to say.”
Though vastly different in approach, today’s rigorous academic camps and the pastoral outdoor sleepaways of yesteryear were designed for a similar consumer: the nervous parent.
Your parents’ parents did it, too
Naturally, parents make decisions in response to social change, whether consciously or not.
From the 1980s to mid 1990s, as women began to enter the workforce in larger numbers and the divorce rate increased, American parents began to fill their children’s free time with structured activities, such as art classes and sports leagues. Then in the early 2000s, 9/11’s terrorist attacks created sweeping safety concerns, and the government overhauled public education with policies like No Child Left Behind. Parents still valued structure but prioritized academic activities, even when a child wasn’t in school.
Paired with longer work hours and the communication boom, parents are still choosing coding camp over wilderness skills. Their own fears about keeping up are trickling down. That means helicopter parenting: summer edition.
The precedent dates back further than the aughts. Mostly white, middle class postwar families felt increasing anxiety about their changing footing in society, which many viewed as threatened. Parents looked to summer camps for a childhood world supposedly free of these fears. Thus, the utopian wilderness camp was born.
“Summer camps provided an important means for this group to address anxieties about gender roles, race relations, class tensions, and particularly about modernity and its impact on the lives of children,” writes Abigail Ayres Van Slyck in A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of America’s Youth.
That preoccupation with stature and competition hasn’t abated since. It has simply evolved.
“It’s not just keeping up with the Joneses. It’s beating the Joneses,” adds Small.
When did it start and why do we still care?
Getting kids access to everything they “deserve” has not always been top of mind, however. As birth rates declined in the mid to late 20th Century, says Small, parents had more investment in children as individuals. “We have more time to be parents and that’s not necessarily a good thing.”
As a consequence, summer camps were designed to stoke that privilege. Suddenly, “child’s rights” extended even to their free time.
“Running barefoot, rolling down hill, going berry picking, having picnics and campfires, digging and wading, building and climbing. These are among the ‘rights’ of every child…,” The New York Times summarizes an essay in Activities for Summer Camp, published in 1948.
In a matter of years, as the number of camp options multiplied, parents suddenly had to plan ahead for summer. Analysts in 1950 projected 4–5 million children in summer programs, most of which were marketed to the middle class. Media at the time reflected parental anxiety over filling kids’ time with worthwhile activities. The biggest problem, it seemed, was how to choose among all the options before camps filled up.
“Parents should consider any particular skills or abilities a specialized camp might help a youngster develop, any needs it might meet,” writes Dorothy Barclay in 1956. Of course, the child’s needs were largely determined by the parent alone.
And so began the pursuit of keeping kids busy, supervised and productive — even after the final school bell rang.
“Camps have become highly structured, a little bit like school. Children have less freedom to create their own activities and are spending much more time in adult-directed activities,” says Peter Gray, research professor at Boston College and author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. As a camp counselor in the 1960s and now an advocate for what he calls “free play,” Gray has witnessed the evolution of keeping kids busy.
My child left behind?
Despite the different ways kids can spend their summers — hiking, coding or watching TV — parents lucky enough to afford summer camp more often base the decision on their own fears.
As easy as it is to blame them, parents are victims of fear perpetuated by media, social and environmental changes, explains Gray. These days, parents want kids to be like adults. They’re having kids later in life, when they are more established professionally and may pass off that mentality and structure to their kids. It’s one reason school trumps play. “The first thing we ask kids is what grade they are in school and who is their favorite teacher,” says Gray. “We almost equate childhood with schooling.”
It follows that summer camp would adopt the education model, too. More than half of parents in 2013 said they want their kids in a summer learning program if they could find an affordable option.
“You’re not just sending your child there to have fun,” says Gray. “It’s now a period of résumé building.”
Whether postwar or post-Facebook, parents want for their kids what they fear they can’t retain, or attain. Summer camp is no exception.
“Everybody is worried,” says Small. “You can’t just leave your kids alone to do nothing.”
Yesterday it was recapturing the notion of the great outdoors; today it’s nabbing valedictorian before someone else’s kid does.
