Remember Camp?

I’ve been thinking about camp a lot this past week. I was back on the East Coast and, as always, summer brought it all back. The heat, the humidity, the smell of campfires and sunscreen.

For years, I filed those memories under “formative, but forgotten.” Lately, though, I’ve realized how wrong that was. Camp was where I got early reps in leadership, conflict, improvisation, and risk.

So this week I’m thinking less about nostalgia and more about systems. About what camp gave me, what it once represented in American childhood, and what it says about this generation that fewer and fewer kids ever go.

I grew up going to overnight camp at W. Alton Jones in Rhode Island. Every summer, for weeks at a time. I packed my own duffel, hugged my parents goodbye, and entered a world without adults, phones, or mirrors.

The year after high school, I became a counselor. I was 18 and responsible for a dozen ten-year-olds. Their sleep, their safety, their meltdowns, their mosquito bites. I wasn’t paid much, but the lessons I learned at camp about leadership and self reliance have stayed with me ever since.

Camp wasn’t relaxing. It was improvisational logistics, emotional triage, and occasional joy, usually covered in DEET. But camp built something in me I can still feel today. A sense of competence, a tolerance for chaos, and a memory of what it’s like to handle things that feel too big, and come out okay.

Most kids don’t get that anymore.

This year, only around 10% of American children will attend an overnight camp. The most common stay is one week. What used to be a formative season has been compressed into a summer sampler, if it happens at all.

In 2020, 80% of overnight camps closed due to COVID. Many never reopened. Others shrunk their programs, or pivoted to virtual camp (how lame does that sound?). The American Camp Association estimates the industry is still below pre-pandemic capacity, even as other parts of childhood return to normal.

Part of that is economic. High-quality camps now cost $1,500 to $3,500 for two weeks. Elite programs can hit $10,000+ for a full summer. 32% of parents in a 2024 survey said their child missed summer programming because of cost.

Camp is still alive, but for many families, it’s out of reach.

The loss goes deeper than price or logistics.

We’re also seeing a cultural shift, away from independence, toward control. Away from unstructured risk, toward curated safety.

Since the early ’90s, unstructured play has dropped 25%, and kids have lost 12 hours of free time per week. Stranger danger, helicopter parenting, achievement culture all chipped away at the conditions that made camp feel normal.

Now, it feels foreign.

We’re raising a generation that’s never been away from their parents. That’s not poetic, it’s a terrible omen.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the most digitally connected, emotionally isolated, and structurally supervised generations in American history. They’ve grown up in a world of soft corners and bright screens. They don’t ride bikes without permission; they don’t have unsupervised fights. They spend 7 to 8 hours a day on devices, typically alone.

And it’s making kids sick.

Rates of youth anxiety, loneliness, and clinical depression are the highest ever recorded. College deans report incoming freshmen who’ve never managed their own schedule. Employers note young workers who struggle with basic in-person conflict. The human operating system is glitching, and no one’s quite sure how to reboot it.

Camp used to help. Sure it filled time, but it filled gaps. Gaps in self-regulation, leadership, conflict resolution. Gaps in resilience.

At camp, you’re responsible for your stuff. Your sleep. Your place in the group. If you forget your flashlight, you don’t get one. If you miss breakfast, you’re hungry.

Today, we offer structured perfection: curated enrichment programs, supervised sports, private therapy, mindfulness apps, 504 accommodations for emotional risk.

We replaced camp with a fragile simulation of competence. And now we wonder why students melt down in office hours and why new hires can’t manage their own calendars. Why loneliness spreads even when everyone’s online.

Camp taught you how to belong, how to contribute, how to fail, and how to bounce back. It was group identity, unscripted leadership, shared consequences, and real improvisation.

And that’s exactly what’s missing.

That discomfort matters. Because kids don’t build resilience watching YouTube. They build it in bunk bed arguments. On mile-five of a hike they didn’t know they could finish. During a homesick sob on night three that doesn’t magically end, but does eventually fade.

And when those moments happen at age 10, they are more manageable at 20.

The real problem is not just that camp is disappearing, it’s that nothing has replaced it.

We didn’t build a modern equivalent. We didn’t transfer its lessons into school, or sports, or therapy. We just deleted it.

No more slow, sweaty weeks of peer-governed chaos. No more teenage counselors improvising authority. No more outdoor proving grounds for kids who needed to be away from home to become themselves.

We offloaded summer to iPads, test prep, and supervised playdates. We rebranded risk as liability. Then we acted confused when a generation raised in that environment started to crumble under the weight of their own perfection.

The kids who never climbed ropes, got lost on hikes, or argued in bunk beds didn’t just disappear.

They graduated.

Now they’re in classrooms, offices, internships. They are trying to lead, manage, and contribute without ever having learned to struggle in an unsupervised space.

The result is a professional class that’s highly credentialed, emotionally untested, and psychologically overparented.

The workplace is increasingly full of people who were never left alone long enough to figure out who they are when things get hard.

You can trace much of today’s professional dysfunction back to early environments that never demanded independence, conflict resolution, or self-regulation.

1. Ambiguity feels hostile

If you’ve never had to solve a problem without instructions, a broad directive doesn’t feel like a challenge, it feels like sabotage.

2. Feedback feels personal

Without reps in low-stakes failure, any critique registers as rejection. Fragility masquerades as “high emotional sensitivity.”

3. Pressure feels paralyzing

If you’ve never improvised authority, mild pressure short-circuits performance. Instead of rising to meet it, people freeze. They are afraid to get it wrong, or worse, be seen trying.

We can’t fix someone’s childhood. But we can create conditions they were never given:

1. Assign ambiguity

Give young employees a goal without a map. Let them flounder a little. Don’t neglect them, give them the space to fail and have everything be okay.

2. Normalize friction

Don’t tiptoe around discomfort. Use it. Debrief it. Make recovery a skill.

3. Reward risk, not polish

Celebrate initiative over perfection. Catch people being brave, not just being right.

4. Build adult campgrounds

Construct bounded, semi-chaotic spaces. Project teams, sprints, field assignments where people have to lead without asking.

The workplace is now where many people first encounter unsupervised discomfort. Treat that moment as an opportunity.

Because if they don’t get those reps at 20, they’ll still be asking for psychological safety at 40.

This isn’t just about camp, it’s about where and how we teach people to grow up.

If we don’t build those spaces on purpose, we’ll be managing their absence forever.

I hope this doesn’t read as a nostalgic plea for campfire songs. I’m pointing at something that used to shape us and wondering what fills that space now.

You can’t outsource resilience, download competence, or A/B test identity.

Camp demanded things of us we didn’t know we could give and it let us grow outside the line of sight of the adults who structured everything else.

That’s disappearing from summer, and from childhood altogether.

And the result is a generation that is academically advanced, digitally fluent, emotionally brittle, and constitutionally allergic to uncertainty.

I hadn’t thought about camp in years until the July heat brought it rushing back.

It’s clear to me what we’re losing when kids never leave home and just have to figure it the fuck out, without a script, a phone, or a parent.

Maybe we’ll bring camp back. Or maybe schools and the workplace will have to get serious about building what childhood forgot: resilience, improvisation, risk. Either way, I hope we stop pretending these skills just appear. They have to be earned.

Up and to the right.