Summer Camps

Summer camps are resort areas for children and adolescents, which operate in the months between one year of school and the next. A well-established tradition in America and Canada, summer camps offer leisure and educational activities and provide an opportunity for participants in an increasingly urban society to explore nature. Although the original concept of the summer camp focused primarily on scouting activities, modern summer camps appeal to diverse interests ranging from computer use to rock music. Many summer camp programs are religious in nature.

Summer Camp Statistics

American summer camps are frequented by 11 million children and adults yearly. There are over 12,000 such camps in the country today, two-thirds of which are operated by nonprofit agencies and religious organizations. The summer camp infrastructure in America is surprisingly large, employing over a million adults on a yearly basis in such wide-ranging fields as administration, maintenance, food service, and health care.

Types of Summer Camps

Summer camps are divided between those hosting traditional and specialized activities, with many camps merging the two into a single program. Traditional camps tend to emphasize:

• Swimming


• Horseback riding


• Hiking


• Canoeing


• Archery


• Campfire activities.

These camps have become steadily less common. As of 2006, less than half of the summer camps in America offered horseback riding, and less than a quarter offered extensive wilderness programs.

Another change in traditional camp structure is the increasing popularity of day camps, which campers attend during the daytime but depart from each night to sleep at home. Formerly, most summer camp programs were overnight camps, but within the past twenty years the number of day camps has nearly doubled in size.

Summer camps are further divided between those which exist for profit and those which offer nonprofit camp services in recognition of their beneficial impact on youth. Today, many youth organizations, such as the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and 4-H, offer relatively inexpensive camp services at no profit to themselves. In addition, many children of poorer families can receive financial assistance to help them to pay camp dues.

Benefits of Summer Camps

Summer camps are widely credited for helping to foster self-esteem and confidence in children, as well as for assisting them in building both social and vocational skills. Most camps today explicitly encourage community service and sensitivity to diversity, and many offer violence prevention programs, particularly those camps which receive many children from inner cities. Summer camps are largely recognized to be a moderating influence for at-risk children and teens, serving to divert their attention from unhealthy activities and inserting them into a disciplined but enjoyable environment.

By Matthew Ingalls