The Importance of a Digitally-Free Summer Camp Experience
This guest post was written exclusively for Pack for Camp by Michael Jacobus, a camp director for over 40 years and the founder of Reset Summer Camp, the world's first clinical summer camp program for teens and adolescents suffering from unhealthy screen-time and social-media overuse habits and gaming addiction.
Kids today are more connected than ever before, via their smart phones, online chat boards like Discord and through a variety of social media platforms like SnapChat, Instagram and TikTok, just to name a few.
While technology has its benefits, the downside is creating a generation of kids who don’t handle in-person social interactions very well. Kids today are losing valuable in-person skills and the ability to read facial expressions and body language because all their communication is virtual.
Summer camp digital free experiences
Summer Camp should be a place to leave all that behind so they can experience the real-world in a safe and supervised environment. Summer Camp offers a variety of experiences that can’t be done in the virtual world:
- Meeting new friends in-person
- Dealing with home-sickness
- Eating new foods
- Being part of a team
- Exploring the outdoors
- Playing games
- Doing hands-on arts and crafts
- Performing in a talent show
- … and so much more
Preparing your child for a digital free summer
In preparation for sending your kid to a summer camp program, we recommend the following practices:
- Start weaning your kids off their devices a little at a time a week or two before they leave for camp.
- Get them on a healthy sleep schedule, with no digital distractions in their bedrooms - is super beneficial
- Lastly, how you, the parent, model your own behavior with technology is probably the single most important factor. You can’t tell your kids to put away their phones at the dinner table if you are on yours.
Here’s to a tech-free summer!