My Child’s First Time at Camp, How to Make It a Success!
The most exciting part of being a kid is also the most terrifying part of being a kid. All of your first time experiences are often equal parts scary and energizing. Going to summer camp is one of those experiencing. Let’s look at it from our child’s perspective to get an idea of how we can help dissuade their fears and create excited anticipation. Here at Midsummer Bible Camp our campers are first eligible to come to camp when they turn 9 years old so let’s approach this from a 9 year olds perspective.
As we approach the 2022 summer there may be more firsts for our new campers than those in the past due to the Pandemic. Here are some potential firsts for our first time campers:
Being away from home without family
Being away from home for almost a week
Spending the night away from home
Sleeping in a group setting for the first time with other kids they don’t know
Exploring the outdoors without their family
Sleeping in a cabin that isn’t air conditioned
Not using a phone or tablet for a week
Spending their own money for snacks and crafts
Getting everything together to shower and brush their teeth
Hanging up their clothes and towels to dry
That’s a lot of firsts for our kids! Let’s look at the ways we can help prepare them for some of the firsts that may come with the camp experience. The first few are easy.
It’s Sleepover Time!
Sleepovers are a great way to prepare our kids for camp. We can start them off easy with spending the night at the grandparents house. Our kids know that their grandparents love them but boy, oh boy, is it a whole different experience staying at grandma’s house than staying at home. The whole place changes when it’s time to go to bed. A new room, a new sleeping spot, new sounds, new lights, a new bedtime routine. All of these little things can help make our kids more resilient to new changes.
Start with an overnight with the grandparents, then make it a weekend, and after that it might be time to start considering a sleepover at a friends house. The sleepover at a friend’s house is a great way to provide our kids with an even more camp like experience. When your child goes to a friend’s house they don’t know their friends parents as well so it’s a little less comforting than grandpa’s house. It also provides them with the opportunity to share a room with a friend while they sleep and they will likely receive comfort and reassurance from their friend. It’s an easy way for our kids to see that our way at home isn’t the only way to do things and it helps strengthen those friendships at the same time. A sleepover at a friends provides another new room, new sleeping spot, new sounds, new lights, and another new routine for them to experience. Coming to camp is getting easier and more exciting! (Especially if that friend comes too!)
Let’s Head Outside!
We are blessed in Middle Tennessee (Especially Dickson and Cheatham Counties) to have state, county, and city parks and outdoor spaces to explore. Children who don’t spend a lot of time outdoors can really benefit from a day at the park or a family tent-camping trip but there is a caveat to this! If you take your kids to the park and you have a bad time and don’t enjoy it then your kids are going to feed off of that! So when you go, enjoy your time, and when you or your kids have had enough head back to the house. Choose to leave your kids wanting to spend more time outdoors than to be overfilled with it. Simply put, don’t force it, enjoy it to your family’s specific limit.
If you are up for spending the night in a tent in the backyard or at a park then this will be one unique experience that will help your kids thrive at camp! The woods of Tennessee come alive at night. Crickets, frogs, owls, and other critters fill the night with their songs. This can be a lot different than the sound of the A/C kicking on at bedtime. Teaching our kids the different sounds of the Tennessee woods gives us an opportunity to watch our kids essentially discover a whole new world.
Tech No Time
On average our kids ages 8-12 across the nation are spending 4 to 6 hours everyday looking at a screen. If we did anything else for that much time each day it might be considered an addiction… When kids arrive at Midsummer Bible Camp the tech basically disappears. Campers with a phone should expect it to be confiscated until the end of the week and it is 100% against the rules (as of 2021) for a camper to even have their phone at MSBC. So how do we help our kids prepare for this? Let’s dial it back slowly. Let’s consider about one or two weeks before camp that we start dialing back screen time. Start by setting clear time limits on devices simply to let our kids know how much time they are spending on their devices already. Step two, dial it back. No tech while eating and then no tech after dinner, and slowly add parameters until the day before camp they are almost or completely tech free. This will make that transition easier for them going to camp and who knows maybe with less screen time we’ll have more face time with our kids. I mean, who even are these small ever changing humans this week? These kids change so quickly!
Get It Together Time
A struggle that we often seen with our younger campers is planning ahead. This struggle is definitely an age appropriate one that we can help them overcome. The main cabins at Camp Leatherwood don’t have bathrooms in them. This means that our campers have to prepare to go to the bathhouse. Their counselors will help remind them but something is going to get overlooked. Common items our campers need to take to the bathhouse are their toothbrush, toothpaste, towel, clothes, and a flashlight (for the walk to the bathhouse).
At home, before we send the kids to camp there are a couple things that we can do. Creating a routine for bath time can go a long way. Having our kids gather the clothes they will wear after bath time and taking it with them into the bathroom is one step. A good way to remind your kid of the things they need to take with them into the shower is to create a space for them to set their shampoo and soap by the bathroom sink so that they have to remember to get it before getting in the shower and then remember to replace it when they get out. Unfortunately at camp a lot of shower supplies get left and lost in the bathhouse. (Side note: write your kiddo’s name on your child’s towel and clothes tags to help avoid losing them.)
Dry It Time
When summer starts and the kids head to the pool, creek, or end of the hosepipe they’ll eventually need to dry off. Our young campers struggle with hanging their clothes and towels up to dry. This is another one of those “let them do it for themselves” moments. Camp counselors are there to help but sometimes a towel gets overlooked or a kid sticks wet clothes back in their bag with their clean clothes and, well, it’s all down hill from there. Sending our kids to camp with a designated dirty clothes bag and teaching them that wet clothes need to be dried before being packed away will hopefully help set our kids up for success. Maybe these are the first steps to a “No Kid Left Towel-less” or a “No Sour Camp Clothes” campaign!
It All Adds Up
We’ve covered a lot to help prepare our kids for some of the “firsts” that come with camp. All of these activities before camp even starts can help set them up for a fun week at camp. However, some of the easiest things to do to make their first camp the best week ever are simple and we haven’t covered them yet. One is to have our kids invite a friend to go to camp with them. A good friend can melt away a camp load of anxiety. Another is for us to have a positive and realistic view of camp when we talk to our kids before they ever become campers. One way to start those positive camp thoughts is to ask our kids to learn about something at camp and tell us about it when we pick them up from camp. Check out this post for some Pre-Camp Questions to Ask Our Kids. Lastly, if you need a list of supplies that campers need to bring check out the FAQ page for more info or this Camp Gear post for more detailed information. Let’s go camp!