benefits of camp

The benefits of camp go far beyond what’s fun. Camp helps girls grow into healthy, happy, confident, and settled people.

Campers sitting on floor
• Summer Camp • Jeff Carter

Curing Community Deficit Disorder

Camp Girls Connected in Community

There are many ways to describe the difference between camp life and the “real world” that happens elsewhere and throughout the school year. At Rockbrook, we might point to our living mostly outdoors and close to nature. We might celebrate our opportunities to experience adventure (hike, paddle, climb!), or to have time for unstructured play. We could describe how camp is a break from electronic technology, and from the social pressures of school revolving around our appearance, possessions, and status. We might highlight the true independence kids experience being away from parents and teachers.

These are all very clear differences, each helping to explain the benefits of a sleepaway camp experience for children. But there is another one, and it is community, the very real sense of being included, respected, trusted and loved by a group of people. Camp is, at its core, a special community built on central values like kindness, cooperation, compassion, care and generosity. It is brimming with enthusiasm and encouragement, wrapped tightly by a collective spirit. At camp, and certainly at Rockbrook, everyone is welcomed and included.

How different this feels from ordinary life! Camp is not about individual consumption, getting a grade, standing out as the best, or advancing at the expense of others. It’s not so ego-centric, nor blind to the people around us. At camp, where there is always support from friends, you’re never left to just fend for yourself.

And how wonderful it feels! Partly, I think joining a camp community, and other communities too, provides us such a powerful sense of contentment because it is so different from ordinary American life. Human beings, and especially kids, crave this kind of connection. We need to know wholeheartedly that we belong to something bigger than “just me,” that our “true self” is accepted and valued by those around us, and unfortunately it is all too rare these days. Perhaps we modern Americans are dis-content because we are dis-connected from an authentic community. Perhaps we are suffering from what could be called “Community Deficit Disorder.”

Thank goodness for camp and its ability to be a powerful and effective antidote for this disorder. It may not be the main reason we attend a sleepaway camp, but the joy of joining a camp community is certainly one of the most important reasons why we love it.

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Brevard Mountains North Carolina
• Summer Camp • Sofie Ehlinger

How to Conquer Your Fears

It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who reminded us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Camp provides one of the most gentle, nurturing backdrops to encourage girls to face their fears and conquer their anxieties. As counselors we are an integral part of this process. Here are some simple tools to help your campers overcome three common fears at camp.

The Fear of Water

  1. Start by encouraging the camper to ease into the water. Sit by the lake with only her toes in the water.
  2. Once the camper is comfortable, move to standing calf-deep in the water. Ask the camper to splash herself with water on her thighs. Once confident with this, splash water on her arms and chest.
  3. When the camper feels comfortable submerging most of her body in the water help her learn how to get her face wet.
  4. Sprinkle only “raindrops” on the camper’s face and hair, to mimic the sensation of a shower. Once the camper’s hair is wet ask her to dip her chin underneath the water. Have her then tilt her face toward the surface of the water and get her forehead wet. Once the camper feels very comfortable performing these tasks, move to teach her to blow bubbles underwater.
  5. Place your index finger in front of the camper’s face. Tell her to imagine your finger is a birthday candle that she must blow out. Once the camper masters the blowing technique, slowly lower your finger having the camper repeat the process until your finger is under the surface of the water and she must have her mouth is the water to “blow out the candle.”

The Fear of Spiders

  1. Begin by educating your camper about spiders. Explain how important spiders our to our ecosystem and how many good things they do for us. Describe how most spiders do not wish to engage with humans (we are bigger than they are- that’s scary to a little, old spider!), primarily eat insects, and lack the capability to bite a human even if they wanted to.
  2. Next introduce your camper to some spider-friendly books. In some cases, the more pictures the better, so that the camper can interact imaginatively with a friendly image of a spider. Other campers will respond to you reading aloud about spiders before bed. Some of our favorite books include Charlotte’s Web, Simon and Schuster Children’s Guide to Insects and Spiders, The Very Busy Spider, and The Eensy Weensy Spider Freaks Out!
  3. Incorporate spider toys as part of your cabin decorations. These could be paper hangings your campers have designed and constructed themselves, toy models of spiders, or stuffed animal spiders. This will help the camper become acquainted with both the form and function of spiders.
  4. Find a real spider (at camp this is not hard!) Have the camper stand next to you, but at a distance to the spider that she feels comfortable. While in the physical proximity of a spider have your camper recall all the ways in which spiders benefit society. Help her to visually identify different parts of the spider’s body and describe their function.

The Fear of Heights

  1. Encourage your camper to sign up for gymnastics. Here, she can begin by balancing on the low balance beam and work towards balancing on the full beam.
  2. Once your camper has slowing exposed herself to these, move to take her on a hike where she can clearly see the altitude increasing, but is assured a gentle path with solid footing.
  3. Before beginning the hike establish at “scared scale” with your camper. Tell her that at different points in the hike you would like to gauge her fear level. One representing “very comfortable” and ten representing “extremely fearful.”Ask her what number she feels comfortable reaching and tell her the moment she feels that number you will immediately turn around. Each day challenge your camper to get a little farther on the hike.
  4. Once a camper has acclimated to a height where she feels comfortable spend time with her in this space. Encourage her to engage in activities that relax her in these elevated places. For example, bring a bottle of lemonade for your camper and her cabin mates  to enjoy at a mountain summit, or have your camper and her friends make bracelets on a waterfall bridge.

When helping a camper overcome a fear it is important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all policy that will work for every girl. The key is patience. Your job is to help a camper face her fear when she is ready, but only she can decide when the time is right.

The Heart of a Wooded Mountain
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Teen Camp Girl
• Children • Jeff Carter

Teens Seeking Sensations

Girls Camp for Teens Thrive on Sensation

If you spend time around teenagers, it’s easy to see them exhibit “sensation seeking” behaviors. They thrive on new experiences and stimuli of all kinds, and tend to take surprising risks. In fact it’s widely accepted within psychology that this personality trait is a dominant force in the lives of teen girls and boys. This sensation seeking is thought to be an evolutionary skill, something that helps teens learn new things, become more independent from their parents and to increase their social competence. Overall, it’s a good thing.

On the other hand, chasing novelty like this, even if they’re unaware of it, can sometimes get teenagers into trouble. As a young teen girl or boy is bombarded by urges to experience new things and to be included in their peer group, they may lack the cognitive development to temper risky behaviors, or blindly hold the perceived benefits of that behavior supremely important over everything else. For example, a girl may experiment with drugs at the urging of her friends, effectively ignoring the personal, legal and health consequences of that decision, because she values the approval of her peer group more. Put differently, it’s thought that risky teenage behavior can be understood as “sensation seeking” run amok.

It’s a dilemma; we want our teenagers to experience new things and meet new people, and thereby to learn and grow from that novelty, but we also want them to choose less risky behaviors and seek out positive experiences and peer influences. How to land on the right side of that equation?

Summer camp is well suited to provide this kind of positive sensation seeking for teens. Everyday at sleepaway camp, girls can enjoy new experiences, whether they be climbing a rock, the excitement of shooting a gun, or just making friends with new and different people.

Camp is a pool of positive peer pressure. Chock full of excellent role models, it promises to help teens channel their urge for novelty and their desire to connect with friends. Camp is also a place where teens can take acceptable risks, challenging themselves in exciting new ways, even as parents can be assured their children are kept safe, encouraged and supported. It’s just an ideal environment for teens seeking sensations. It’s no wonder they love it so much!

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Girls Camps Counselors
• Counselors • Jeff Carter

Be a Camp Counselor Instead

Two girls being camp counselors

Did you know that being a summer camp counselor is more beneficial to your career than taking a summer internship, that the skills practiced and learned working at camp have far more value than the clerical duties often assigned college student interns? That’s exactly the claim put forward by Darryl Brown in his short article appearing in USA Today. He describes being a camp counselor as the “perfect summer job.”

“In this job, I am part of an organization that gives me duties that are critical to its long- and short-term success. Supervisors give me responsibilities such as interacting directly with customers on a daily basis, and they fully integrate me into the professional hierarchy. To top it all off, I am learning legitimate skills that will help me develop professionally when I move into the workforce.”

It’s true; having “camp counselor” on your resume is a very good thing. The skills required to be a great counselor are valuable and in demand by employers, things like problem solving, leadership, creativity and imagination, being a “team player,” stamina, compassion, responsibility and maturity.

Being a camp counselor means receiving training in all of these areas, and then means practicing them in the real world, working with kids and taking on the complexities of life in a summer camp community. Everyone will tell you that being a camp counselor was the most challenging and the most fun job they ever had. I suspect most summer interns won’t be able to say that.

What are you going to do this summer?

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Camper with Character
• Children • Jeff Carter

Camp Builds Character

Summer camp builds character

It doesn’t take long, once your daughter has attended an overnight summer camp like Rockbrook, to realize that the weeks spent having fun, enjoying outdoor adventure, horseback riding and all sorts of crafts have also been profoundly formative. Summer camp professionals and camp families alike, all know it; camp builds character.

In fact, it was back in 1929 when Hedley Dimock and Charles Hendry published their study Camping and Character: A Camp Experiment in Character Education. This book reported what the authors saw as positive changes in campers’ behavior as well as the mechanisms that explain how camp can be so “stimulating and enlightening.” Far beyond what ordinary classroom learning can provide, they saw the highly social nature of camp to be most important for helping children grow more responsible, trustworthy and more caring, fair and respectful in their interaction with others.

At Rockbrook we take great care to create a culture where all children feel included and appreciated, where staff members are extraordinarily admirable, and where positive peer pressure reinforces honesty and kindness. This is camp, and this is why camp builds character.

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Smiling Child at camp
• Children • Jeff Carter

A Refuge from Advertising

Summer Camp Child

We’ve written before about how the average American child spends 53 hours per week consuming electronic media— television, computers, cell phones, video games, ebook readers —interacting with various screens. One consequence of this media consumption is all the advertising it includes. Woven throughout these hours of electronic entertainment is a flood of ads and product branding, to the extent of about 3000 ads per day, according to one study. Just about everywhere our children go, including their schools, they are exposed to carefully crafted advertising messages. Advertisers know that children constitute not only a large market themselves, but also a powerful force capable of influencing their parents’ spending. Even more insidiously, they know exposing children to brands very early in life can have lasting brain effects that influence their buying habits as adults.

Recognizing this trend in America, researchers have begun to study the effects pervasive advertising and branding have on children, their (cognitive, social and personal) development, and their overall physical and psychological health. Unfortunately, it’s not good, with links to tobacco, alcohol and drug use, to obesity, to premature sexual activity, and to fostering negative body image ideals. There is strong evidence that advertising and even subtle branding messages have profoundly negative effects, so much so, several European countries, Greece, Belgium and Sweden for example, have banned advertising that explicitly targets children.

Fortunately for the children that attend summer camp, there is a true break from media consumption and from its accompanying advertising. Spending time at Rockbrook, playing outside, and enjoying real friends and relationships, function as countering forces. Back to the basics of childhood, girls at camp find they are more creative, more imaginative and more adventurous. We all know camp is a refuge; it is in this way as well— a refuge from advertising and branding.  And that’s a great thing.

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Marie Brown Chapel Reading
• Summer Camp • Jeff Carter

Marie Brown Chapel

Toward the end of our recent Rockbrook Alumnae reunion celebrating the 90th year of the camp, the women attending held an impromptu chapel meeting. Like those held on Sunday mornings in the summer, this gathering was a chance to sing favorite traditional songs and reflect upon some of the more important experiences, lessons and values we all associate with Rockbrook. These are wonderful moments, often full of personal stories, and on this occasion, childhood memories of camp.

Marie Brown, who came to camp starting in 1989 when she was 8, shared something that we’re so proud to reprint here. It’s a brief reflection on how the Spirit of Rockbrook can sustain and revive us long after we grow up and become adults in the “real world.”

Alumnae Reunion Chapel with Marie Brown
Alumnae Reunion Chapel

“The wonders of air travel, incredible timing, (and a supportive husband) have made it possible for me to step out of the stifling mayhem I have been living to come for a brief moment to be here. All the stone and concrete has fallen away into mountain laurel, rushing water, beloved rocks and roots and trees…and faces that, despite the decades, haven’t seemed to age.

I have to admit, I was afraid to come. My memories of this place are so deeply embedded in my heart, so close to my core, so invaluable to my spirit, I was afraid that coming back here with the sharpened, hardened and perhaps jaded eyes of an adult would somehow mar the perfection of those memories. And between having a genetically poor memory, and the inability to return to any of the places I actually called home as a child, at times it feels as though the past were no more than a figment of my imagination. There is no other place on the planet that I can go to that holds anywhere as much of my memory in its hillsides as this place. So it was with trepidation that I came to tread back into those memories.

Marie Brown and Sarah Carter
Marie and Sarah

I was grateful as a child and well aware it was only because of the generosity of my grandmother (also a Rockbrook girl) that I was able to come year after year. But I don’t think there was any way for me to understand how big a gift she was giving me until I left Rockbrook to fare the rockier world of “civilization” without my annual reprieve in this Rivendale.

I have spent countless days and nights over the last years feeling I was going crazy, feeling so trapped or confused or heartbroken about the state of the world; a world continually more driven by fear, over “teched” yet disconnected, and terrifyingly detached from, and destructive of, nature. It is so easy to get overwhelmed by all the noise… and for someone as sensitive as myself, to feel despair. But despair won’t do any of us any good. So coming back here at this particular moment for me, and walking literally as if I were Mary Poppins jumping into the chalk painting of my childhood and finding it hasn’t changed (and where it has it has only gotten better) has given me such rejuvenating hope. I am not crazy. I am not intolerant, or impatient, or bitter. I am just in severe withdrawal of my annual dose of Rockbrook.

And what this weekend has shown me is that the gifts and perspective, and lessons this place has to offer are just as present and valuable to me now as there were for me when I was a little girl. If not more so. These enduring stones soften my hardened defenses. The cold waters warm my chilled spirit. These steep hills dull my impatience and intolerance. And rather than damaging the perfection of my memories, returning has added to them. Returning to Rockbrook for even this brief sip has filled my belly once again with a little bit of ginger, a little bit of grit, a little bit of spirit and a little bit of wit to carry with me as I go back out once again to face the big bad world.”

Thanks Marie!

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swimming in camp lake
• Children • Jeff Carter

Back to School

Camp Lake Swimming

This time of year, as we head back to school and the memories of our time at camp can seem far away, it’s a good idea to reflect upon some of the important habits and skills we learned during our stay at Rockbrook, and to realize how important they can be throughout the rest of the year.  But what are some of those values? What are some of the surprising things camp taught us that can still serve us well at school?

At Rockbrook this summer we learned:

—things are more fun when we include everyone
—you can be creative with just about anything
—making friends is easy when we respect and care for each other
—everything is better in a costume 🙂

Of course there are a lot of other ways camp helps kids grow too.

Peg Smith, the CEO of the American Camp Association, also wants kids to remember what they learned at camp, in particular the “Three Cs” — Confidence, Curiosity, and Character. Pack all these great things in your school backpack. You know camp is awesome; now make that true for school too!

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Camp Girls Laughing
• Children • Jeff Carter

Camp Friends are Real Friends

Summer Camp Friends Laughing

How many Facebook “friends” do you have? And how many of them are also your “real” friends? Of those, how many do you actually see or talk to regularly? It’s a strange modern American phenomenon that paradoxically, we have loads of these kind of casual contacts, acquaintances and loose relationships, but also often feel profoundly on our own. As we spend more of our time plugged into the virtual world of the Internet (a rather solitary activity, after all), as we are encouraged to be uniquely independent and value our “freedom,” and as we are increasingly “on the move” to pursue professional, financial or lifestyle “opportunities,” we seem to have been quick to sacrifice real friendships.

Daniel Akst, in his essay “America: Land of Loners?” published last year in the Wilson Quarterly, clearly makes this point. He describes how for so many of us, a fierce dedication to independence and self-sufficiency is robbing from us an important form of human relationship that can’t be replaced by one’s spouse, immediate family members (e.g., children, siblings, etc.), or pets. Combine this with complex demands on everyone’s time— work, school, chores, etc. —and it’s easy to see how it’s become quite difficult to make and maintain close friends.

I suspect, also, that children aren’t entirely immune to this phenomenon. They too, though perhaps less so than adults, struggle with being overly busy, with spending a lot of their time alone or online, and with having fewer opportunities to meet new people and share common rewarding experiences. The ordinary lives of children today are generally less suited to building a strong network of close, true friends. This is worrisome, especially when you consider that the forces behind this trend will only get stronger as our children grow older and take on greater responsibilities.

Ah, thankfully, there is camp, that magical place were kids get to relax a bit, take a break from the pressures of school and try some new things just for the fun of it. It’s a place to meet new people, share wonderful experiences, and simply do a lot of things together. Camp gets them outside, away from the buzz and flicker of electronic media, and allows children to explore who they are and be their authentic selves. All of this is the ideal setting to develop real friendships, to connect with others in meaningful ways. Camp is where your real friends are. And everyone will tell you, you have to come back to camp every summer… to be with your friends.

Camp is a haven, a place where children can fulfill their need for true friends, and is something we all can use nowadays.

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Let Girls Move outdoors
• Outdoors • Jeff Carter

Camp Gets ’em Moving

Girls Move Outside at Camp

One of the top reasons camp is great for kids is that it’s full of action! With almost 30 different camp activities, sports and adventures each day, everybody is on the move. Girls are zipping around Rockbrook all day long, up and down the hills, in and out of the lake, and from here to there with their friends. Camp is moment after moment of “Hey, Let’s go… (fill in the blank)!”

Even better, most of this action happens outside.  So in addition to the simple physical benefits of being active, campers also find themselves being more relaxed, more perceptive, and even more caring.  The research supporting the positive effects of outdoor experience for children is strong and convincing.

Now there is a national campaign that recognizes and supports most of this. Launched by First Lady Michelle Obama, this initiative, titled “Let’s Move!“, is dedicated to solving the problem of childhood obesity in America by encouraging common sense strategies and providing important information to improve child nutrition and physical activity. Our kids need to eat healthier food and to be more active if we are to address this growing problem.

Camp can easily be seen as a model for the Let’s Move! initiative. After all, outdoor activity is the name of the game around here at Rockbrook, but also, we proudly serve excellent, nutritious meals, using local produce when we can, avoiding trans-fats, and making most things from scratch. If you haven’t seen our Taste of Rockbrook video, check it out and see what I mean.

As we, and the Let’s Move! initiative, advocate for a more healthy, active, balanced life for children, let’s get our kids outside this summer, and let’s get them to camp!

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