A 12-Year-Old’s View of Summer Camps

Summer camp occupies a particular place in the American childhood mythology — a place of canoes and campfire songs and best friends made in six weeks who somehow feel permanent. The twelve-year-old's perspective on this institution, when honestly sought, is considerably more complicated than the mythology suggests.

At twelve, summer camp exists at a social inflection point. The campers who loved it at eight, when the structure was comforting and the activities were straightforwardly fun, are navigating something more complex now. Social hierarchies have sharpened. The question of who you are becoming — which friend group, which self-presentation, which emerging identity — has started to feel urgent in ways it didn't at eight.

Camp's deliberate removal of smartphones and social media (at least at traditional camps) was designed to be liberating; for some twelve-year-olds it was, and for others it was anxiety-inducing in ways that camp counselors who were themselves pre-smartphone hadn't fully anticipated.

The twelve-year-old who had a good camp experience in a given summer was typically one of a specific type: someone who was curious about new activities, reasonably secure socially, and genuinely able to form friendships outside their usual context. The twelve-year-old who had a bad camp experience was usually someone for whom any of those conditions didn't quite apply — but who had been sent by parents operating from their own camp mythology.

What worked, consistently, was choice. Camps that matched their programming to individual interests, that offered specialization rather than generic activities, tended to produce the positive outcomes that parents remembered from their own childhoods. The generic all-purpose camp model was harder to sustain as children's expectations grew more differentiated.