How Summer Camp for Kids Got So Complicated (and Expensive)

What time is it? Summertime.

Summer is the best few months of the year for most students everywhere. For some, it may conjure expectations of canoes, lakes and sleepaway experiences. This time of year can also mean day camps that are close to home — and they likely have specialized activities such as sports, art or science for an enriching vacation time.

But for parents and caregivers facing an annual, prohibitive expense, summertime can be a stressful period of hustling to find — and secure — a spot for their kids in the increasingly harried and pricey summer camp landscape. One KQED listener shared with KQED Forum during a recent show about summer camp just how difficult it can be: “I found getting into camps harder than getting Bruce Springsteen tickets.”

So if getting a space in camp feels like a race against the clock and a tremendous strain on the wallet — especially if you didn’t secure one in January — you are not alone.

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KQED Forum spoke to three experts to learn how the United States developed such an expensive summer camp scene and how to provide the best summer camp experience for your kids at a more reasonable price. (And if you’re one of the many parents who don’t send your kids to camp, these experts can help provide a glimpse into the experience.)

• Lydia Kiesling, journalist and author. Kiesling’s most recent piece for Bloomberg is “How Summer Camp Became Such a Hot Mess for Parents.”
• Eduardo Caballero, co-founder and executive director of EDMO, a summer camp in the Bay Area
• Jessica Calarco, an expert on inequalities in education and family life, and associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

You are seriously not alone — it is wild out there

Journalist Lydia Kiesling said she made a super spreadsheet to track down all the most attractive camps, nailing down prices, locations and more. And she learned she wasn’t the only one after posting questions on social media to learn from other parents.

“I was not expecting to hear the word ‘spreadsheet’ so many times,” she said. “I want to emphasize that if you are having a spreadsheet, you’re probably already in a position of relative privilege compared to many parents who are not in a position to start that scramble in January, and be doing that like a complex whiteboard — with all your maps and pins of figuring out how it’s going to work.”

With camps, however, having special weekly schedules — and with some parents trying to secure spots for multiple kids — it’s become a worryingly expensive dance.

“It is very complex. Parents are really finding that it takes just a massive amount of logistical arranging to figure out a whole summer of care,” Kiesling said.

How did summer camps become a part of American life?

In many ways, summer camps reveal a lot about child care and the social safety net in the United States.

Jessica Calarco, an associate professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said workers in other countries like France get ample paid vacation time.

“That means that most families don’t have to worry about what to do with their kids during the summer because they have that time off to travel or to spend time with their kids at home,” Calarco said.

“In the U.S., we don’t provide those protections for families,” she added. “We don’t provide guaranteed paid time off for workers. And that means that most families can’t afford to just stay home with their kids while schools are closed.”

In the United States, said Calarco, this mismatch “disproportionately gets pushed onto moms to deal with, because we haven’t structured our society and our economy in ways that make it possible for families to try to fill these gaps.”

These aren’t new anxieties for American parents and caregivers. Kiesling, the journalist, used newspaper archives to look at the development of attitudes toward summer camps over the decades, dating as far back as the 1950s.

“There were these articles that were targeted to relatively affluent readers of The [New York] Times, [that] were really kind of stoking that concern, like, ‘It’s January. What is your child going to do? What exciting and enriching experience are you going to give them? All these camps fill up very quickly. You’ve got to get ready.’”

“And that just sort of ramped up over the years,” said Kiesling.

As sleepaway camps shut down in the 1970s due to economic factors, day camps began to evolve, and computer camps became all the rage in the ’80s. Then, Kiesling said, “There would be a backlash article: ‘What are we doing to our kids? They’re so overscheduled.’”

“Which is exactly what people say today,” she noted.

Before you say, ‘Back in my day … ’

American life has changed a lot in the past few decades. Namely, more two-parent families have both parents working.

Many American adults may remember childhood feeling much looser when it came to supervision. And while Kiesling said she doesn’t want to “impugn anybody’s memory of their childhood,” she believes there’s “a little bit of selective memory on that front.”

“There are adults now of all ages who remember this kind of pastoral childhood where they could go out in the morning and come back in the evening. I think often that was possible because they perhaps had a parent at home who was likely a mom at home,” she said.

Kiesling emphasized that while women have always been working outside of the home, that number soared in the middle of the 20th century.

“There are some kids who had wonderful kind of latchkey experiences, but then there were others who did not — who were placed with family members, or neighbors or really just left to kind of rattle around … [in] possibly unsafe situations,” she said.

Kiesling stressed that she wants to “honor the experiences that people have had of kind of unstructured childhoods,” but said she can’t help but feel skeptical when she perceives people using their own childhoods “as a cudgel to sort of beat modern parents with.”

So while some people call it “helicopter” parenting, Kiesling points out that the lack of a social safety net has left parents and kids on their own for a long time in the United States.

If you don’t send your kids to camp, you’re not alone

Calarco said it’s important to remember that camp is not a universal experience. Not every kid will attend one, and of the ones who do, many may choose a less expensive option — such as those run by the Boys and Girls Clubs, which offer enriching activities.

“Only about a third of kids in the U.S. go to camp during the summer, and less than 10% of them go to overnight camp,” Calarco said. “And essentially, summer is one of the most segregated times of the year, in part because of the high cost of camps. And that those kids who are going to summer camp are disproportionately affluent white kids.”

“I think certainly we need a whole host of new programs for families that provide the kind of support they need, both logistically in terms of paid time off and also in terms of ample support for child care,” she said.

Also, most American families still tend to live near their extended families. But the state of the economy may make the option of leaving your kid with the grandparents even harder.

“People are retiring later because of the financial precarity that we’re in right now,” Calarco said. “And so, Grandma may not be available during the summer, if she’s still around to provide that kind of care.”

“I think short of making child care a universal public system — which many countries have done in terms of providing year-round care for kids, making sure that parents are able to be in the workforce when they don’t have that paid time off — that the next steps that we can do are to provide kind of ample subsidies for families,” she said.

“At the same time, I think it’s hard to do that in a way that is equitable,” Calarco added. “Given the differences in the kinds of camps that families want and that families are able to pay for.”

Here’s where you can find a summer camp

According to Eduardo Caballero, director of the Bay Area-based, out-of-classroom educational program EDMO, preregistration for the summer camps he oversees starts as early as November.

At EDMO, 40% of the spots are filled by the end of February, he said. But that still leaves more than half available.

“I imagine this year, [enrollment is] back to probably close to pre-pandemic levels,” he said.

“I always recommend that families do a program for at least two weeks so that kids can build relationships with other kids and also the staff,” Caballero recommended. “It takes time for that staff to get to know your child, takes time for your staff to get your child to understand the culture of that camp, that specific camp, and build those lasting relationships.”

Of course, a longer stay like this is not going to be possible for all families.

A comprehensive directory of programs is available on EDMO’s website; many of the camps are partnered with school districts. If you’re seeking financial assistance, fill out this form.

A few summer camp options around the Bay Area

One of EDMO’s programs is the Thomas Edison Charter Academy, which has a three-week-long session that costs $30; it’s open to any child living in San Francisco who meets certain requirements, as well as those who identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander.

For kids closer to their teens, Caballero said, volunteering at camps is a great leadership opportunity. You can check out Berkeley options on Berkleyside’s East Bay Summer Camp Guide, including Aim High, a free camp for fifth to eighth graders.

The Bay Area offers many affordable camps for kids and teens with disabilities. Camping Unlimited was cited by listeners who called into Forum as an organization that was accessible to children and adults with developmental disabilities. And Shared Adventures in Santa Cruz provides free recreational events for disabled people of any age. (Check out accessibility rentals on their website.)

Camp Paivika has programs for “children, teens and adults with mild to severe physical and developmental disabilities,” while Quest Camp has offerings for adolescents and young adults up to the age of 22 “who experience emotional and social issues.” Enchanted Hill Camp from Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired is a program for children, teens and adults.

For children facing childhood cancer, there is Okizu; for kids with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, Camp Oasis; and for children with Type 1 diabetes, there’s DYF.

For more resources, Support for Families of Children With Disabilities has a list from 2021 of accessible recreation programs (PDF). (Note: Some websites have since closed, such as Edventure More and Galileo Learning. Camp Pacifica is no longer a children’s camp, and Camp Edmo is now EDMO.) You can also find a Boys and Girls Club in your region.

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