For many generations, parents have been sending their children to summer day and summer sleepaway camps. From swimming to hiking and from arts and crafts to making new friends, summer camp is a rite of passage that most children love. However, many parents don’t realize that while camps are fun, they also have benefits for your children that you might not have imagined. In this list, we will go into a few of the top reasons that sending your child to summer camp is a really good idea.
1. Helps Your Child Build a Unique Interest
There are very few schools that offer any type of archery, video game design for kids or even how to become a successful businessman, however, there are summer camps that do. If your child is interested in learning something that is unique and not offered in the normal school environment, then summer camp isn’t only going to be fun for them, but educational as well. Sending your child to summer camp lets them explore that interest and you never know what could happen from there, as it only takes a spark.
2. Helps to Eliminate Categories and Peer Groups
Many children go to school with the same students from kindergarten until they graduate. While this can be a good thing, it can be bad as well, because they tend to fall into certain categories and peer groups. After all, the popular cliques, sports cliques, and nerd cliques, don’t exist only in the movies. At a summer camp, kids are thrown in with every child from every peer group and category, which often helps them to break out of their peer group and explore something new, thereby eliminating those categories altogether for them.
3. Helps Your Child to Unplug from Technology
Parents know that their children live in an age where you would be hard-pressed to find a child between the ages of five and eighteen that doesn’t have a phone attached to one hand and a video game controller in the other. Summer camp gives your child the chance to unplug from technology and see what else is out there. It is estimated that today’s children spend over eight hours a day plugged in and miss seeing what’s going on in the world outside. Summer camp can help them to rediscover the wonders of nature.
4. Helps Your Child to Meet New Friends
For many of us, some of our best friends in life are kids that we met during summer camp. These are friends that your child may keep up with throughout the rest of their life and stuff like that cannot be replaced. There are many children that go to summer camp, find friends who have the same interest that they do and feel that they have found their people by summer’s end.
5. Helps to Build Your Childs Self-Confidence
While you love that your child depends on you and do everything you can to shelter them and keep them safe, sending them to summer camp can give them a self-confidence they are going to need when it’s time to venture into the real world. Whether it’s learning how to paddle a canoe or learning how to make friends on their own, camp gives them a self-esteem boost and an independence, they might not get at home.
Camp is fun and entertaining for children, no matter what age they are. They won’t be bored or tied to the TV all summer long, instead, they will be out make friends and learning new things as they go.
