Did We Ruin Summer Camp by Making It Safe?

When Danny, David, and a third friend had finally zigzagged their way through the older kids’ side of camp, Danny and the friend lifted David, holding his feet in their hands, until he could reach an unlocked window and shimmy inside. Rain was still pouring down. Danny says he gets shivers thinking about it 11 years later. (Danny and David’s names have been changed to protect their privacy.)

The two agree it was a risky, nearly fatal endeavor, between the weather conditions and how high David stood on the side of the building. Plus, sneaking out of the bunk after lights-out was a big no-no—one that could have gotten them in trouble. But was it worth it for the bottle of Powerade, a pack of the Israeli wheat snack Bissli, and the full-size Hershey’s bar? Absolutely.

The fact is, the underground black market of non-perishable foods at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires was a matter of basic economic principles, says Jake, a 24-year-old living in New York (whose name has also been changed to protect his privacy), who spent six summers there as a camper and one as a counselor. Three packs of ramen noodles could be worth one box of Wacky Mac. Two boxes of Wacky Mac could be worth a frisbee from last year, and five boxes could be worth a frisbee from five years ago.

Naturally, the typical dining-hall menu was uninspiring: coffee cake or cinnamon buns at breakfast, cold cuts at lunch, and hot dogs, hamburgers, or chicken for dinner. According to Jake, these meals held little appeal for the campers, who craved anything from beyond the camp’s gates. Staff members returning from their nights off would smuggle in treasures like half a grilled cheese sandwich from a local diner or a single Dunkin’ munchkin. At 2 a.m., they’d wake the campers for impromptu tournaments of rock-paper-scissors, with these coveted morsels as prizes. Sometimes, they’d simply toss the food into the middle of the bunk and let chaos ensue. “It was like The Hunger Games,” Jake says.

For Jake, David, Danny, and their friends, rule-breaking was central to their time at summer camp. They’d avoid swimming in the lake because they couldn’t roughhouse in the water. They’d play nonalcoholic versions of drinking games that ended in horrible punishments, like sleeping outside on a hammock surrounded by potato chips to attract skunks or licking the bunk floor from end to end. They’d ditch educational and Judaic programming and hide from staff members who’d go looking for them. They remember it like hazing in a fraternity, though there were no drugs, alcohol, or even technology involved. There were only energetic, rebellious preteens and their 18-to-19-year-old counselors, who often encouraged the misbehaving.

Despite it all, the boys reveled in these moments. Jake remembers feeling honored when his counselors chose to mess with him and not another camper. He understood these playful rituals were woven into the fabric of camp culture, and he eagerly anticipated the day he’d be on the other side, carrying on the tradition as a counselor himself. “Your role models applaud you for doing the wrong thing and give you a badge of respect for doing it,” David says. “It’s Animal House.”

For some campers, the chaos was electrifying, making them feel chosen, challenged, and connected to a tradition stretching back to their parents, aunts, uncles, and even grandparents. For others, it was alienating, and they chose not to return for another summer. Yet either kind of alum agrees that kind of camp couldn’t—and wouldn’t—exist today. And if it did, even some of the fiercest defenders of old camp ways say they wouldn’t send their future children. The adventures they treasure from their own summers are now considered too dangerous. But in protecting campers from every risk, can the spirit of camp survive?

I grew up attending a camp in the Okanagan region of British Columbia, Canada. For 10 summers, I lived in air-conditioned cabins, and once I reached 12, counselors no longer lived in the bunks with us. Over the years, I won the staff-in-training leadership award, pretended to have my period to get out of swimming lessons, and got multiple ear infections. I learned how to water ski and had my first kiss on a rock called the “NKBJ Rock” (I’ll let you try and decipher what that stood for). Staffers also made us play a game called “orgy,” where they’d pick one boy and one girl to try and kiss each other, while another had to try to physically interject. They’d not only take us skinny-dipping but also participate themselves.

When I came back to work as a counselor in 2021, they told us we couldn’t say things like “Girls, time to change for lunch!” anymore. Instead, we had to use “Campers, time to change for lunch!” And at breakfast time, I was to pour cereal into each of their bowls. There’d been too many spills, and too much hogging of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The common chatter in the staff lounge—which was regularly stocked with Diet Coke, granola bars, and Okanagan peaches—was disdain over how new rules forced us to coddle the kids, and how when we were campers, things were different, and things were better.

That wasn’t happening in a vacuum. Summer camps across North America have undergone similar transformations, reflecting broader shifts in the mammoth industry. As a whole, the American summer camp business has become a $3.5 billion-plus enterprise, with steady growth since its pandemic low. Massachusetts hosts around 200 of America’s thousands of summer camps, and New England holds the distinction of having established the country’s first summer camp more than 160 years ago.

The promise of sleepaway camp has always been an escape from urban life. As one early camp founder put it, camp was a way to save humanity from “dying of indoor-ness.” Today, “indoor-ness” is compounded by social media and Gen Z’s growing reliance on it. Most North American camps are technology-free zones: Campers either leave their cell phones at home or hand them over to directors upon arrival, who lock them away for the summer. When campers try to smuggle in a contraband phone, it often gets confiscated (or, in some cases, the camper gets sent home).

Though the intensity and mischief that once defined sleepaway camp have given way to a more structured, supervised, and sensitive experience, camp still offers something valuable for a generation raised on screens and shaped by post-COVID social awkwardness: a fully in-person, technology-free environment. Ken Shifman, executive director of Camp Avoda, an all-boys Jewish summer camp in Middleborough, knows that kids often use their devices to bury their faces and avoid social interaction. Once they step off the bus and onto the shores of Tispaquin Pond, he says, it takes a few extra beats to adjust to the three-dimensional world around them.

That’s partly because many kids are still reeling from the effects of the pandemic. A recent Gallup poll found that 45 percent of parents of school-age children say the pandemic had a negative impact on their child’s social skills, and more than 20 percent said that the effects persist today. Most North American camps closed in 2020 and operated under COVID restrictions in 2021. Every summer since has required relearning how to socialize, cooperate, and connect in person. Which helps explain why camp remains in demand, and why enrollment has stayed high.

Still, the pandemic-era changes reshaped many cherished parts of camp life. At Ramah in the Berkshires, for instance, former campers mourned the loss of their legendary sports traditions. At the end of each summer, Ramah in the Berkshires met with Camp Ramah New England, otherwise known as Ramah Palmer, for an all-day competition that Jake describes as “the Super Bowl times a million.”

Training for “Palmer Day” was an all-summer commitment, with campers ages 12 and up locking in their sport choice—the likes of basketball, softball, Ultimate Frisbee, and soccer—during the first few days of the session. For about two weeks leading up to the competition, some days had entire schedules dedicated to practicing and receiving motivational speeches from staff. Jake says it was somewhat torturous, the way staffers pushed him to the point of utter exhaustion, often under the beating sun. But he ate it up: “It was a badge of honor to throw up after running during your sports practice period,” he says.

In 2021, “Palmer Day” was canceled due to COVID restrictions. When it returned in 2022, it no longer had the same competitive spirit. “I think they moved away from it because even though we happen to enjoy sports, there are a lot of people at the camp who don’t,” Jake says. “I can imagine that being literally hell on earth for them.”

Certainly, not every camper drank the Kool-Aid. Harrison, a 24-year-old living in New York (whose name was also changed to protect his privacy), was “weeded out,” as his friends say, of Ramah in the Berkshires, after spending one summer there when he was 11. (He went on to attend years of summer camp elsewhere.)

The relentless competition and teasing were two of the factors that drove him away. But what unsettled him even more was the normalization of nudity. Harrison remembers wanting to attend camp to play sports and goof off with his friends, but what he found instead, he says, was “so many penises out.”

Campers lived in close quarters: 15 to 20 boys packed into narrow rows of wooden bunk beds, with their counselors sleeping at the front of the room without even a sheet to separate them. Harrison and Jake joke that every cabin had someone who acted overly sexual for the fun of it. Sometimes, that person was a staffer, though most would opt to change their clothes in the bathroom. Yet Danny and David remember one staffer who’d dance around naked and pose like he was in a Gold Bond ad. “He just put on a show,” David says. “That’s the one event that I can look back on knowing it was weird in the moment.”

Today, Ramah in the Berkshires, like many American summer camps, has evolved its protocols. For campers, it seems like the push for change has come from concerns about the intense focus on sports and inter-camp competition. The former lack of boundaries surrounding sexuality and nudity may be another reason why camps have tightened their policies. In 2022, Ramah in the Berkshires settled a lawsuit alleging mishandling of a sexual assault complaint involving two campers in 2018. At Camp Speers YMCA in the Poconos, several hours from the Berkshires, former camper Lila Oest, now 29 and living in New York, recalls a camp photographer in his twenties from the U.K. taking inappropriate photos of young female campers.

Incidents like these have led to more supervision for campers and stricter boundaries for staff. “Back in the day,” Oest says, “it was not a big deal for a 16-year-old CIT [counselor-in-training] and a 17-year-old JC [junior counselor] to have a relationship, or even a 17-year-old JC and a 22-year-old counselor.” But once she was an older counselor, upper leadership made it a priority to outlaw these relationships.

In fact, camp directors acted to protect young people and cover legal bases even a decade ago, Oest says, and the crackdown became almost militaristic. Staff got fired for hanging out on the inflatable water toys late at night, when in the past, firing was reserved for much more severe offenses, like smoking weed on camp premises. She felt that many rules unfairly targeted female staffers, too, who were reprimanded for wearing bikinis instead of one-piece bathing suits. As for campers, sneaking off to make out in the woods would get them sent home. “The independence,” she says, “that was the main thing that changed.”

The Ramah boys recall a similar loss of independence when they returned as staff members. While they recognize that many aspects of camp culture needed addressing, they think the overhaul was somewhat misdirected. “New camp,” as they call it, may have the same activities, but it is completely devoid of the unsupervised, unstructured moments they considered most transformative.

Fresh from a dinner with his Camp Avoda friends from the early 1980s, Shifman shared a remarkable testament to summer-camp loyalty: Nearly 90 percent of campers return each summer, with staff retention rates running even higher. The bonds forged at this sleepaway camp, it seems, are built to last.

He credits this strong devotion to the camp’s deep-rooted traditions, collaborative atmosphere, and broad mix of programming. As an all-boys camp, Avoda has long emphasized sports, with football, soccer, tennis, beach volleyball, and nighttime basketball on an illuminated court among the favorites. But Shifman says he and his board of directors are grappling over whether to market Avoda as a sports camp, concerned it may alienate boys who aren’t as athletically inclined. They’ve worked to give equal weight to other programs, such as their robust waterfront, where campers can water ski, sail, kayak, canoe, and fish. They also have arts offerings, including ceramics, painting, photography, and a new air-conditioned “maker space” stocked with creative stations like a T-shirt design and printing area.

Last summer, the staff anointed a “camper council”—a student-body-like group of campers ages 10 and up who help them answer questions like “How do we make this place nicer?” or “How do we make this place culturally better?” While Shifman and the camp director still speak at Friday night or Saturday morning Shabbat services to amplify the camp’s values—of brotherhood, leadership, spirit—he’s beginning to step back and let campers deliver those messages themselves. And despite what its name suggests (the Hebrew word avoda translates to “work” in English), Camp Avoda focuses not on labor, but on service to others. “We always talk about being good citizens in camp,” Shifman says. “We teach boys how to be proper young men.”

Further west, in the Berkshires, is Eisner Camp, a coed Reform Jewish summer camp that houses about 500 campers and 300 staffers each summer. Like Avoda, it offers a wide range of programming, from creative and performing arts to krav maga and flag football. “There’s a lot of choice at our camp,” says director Paul Isserles. Campers spend about five hours a day in elective activities, balancing individual and team options, like running and weightlifting for older campers, and baseball, basketball, and Ultimate Frisbee for all ages. There’s also gardening, jewelry making, a music recording studio, and a newly added high ropes challenge course.

Isserles estimates a camper retention rate similar to Avoda’s, of more than 90 percent. He’s about to enter his fourth summer as director, though he was a staff member for a handful of summers in the 1990s.

The camp is run far more professionally than it was back then, Isserles says. That includes providing mental health services and other protections for campers and staff. There are more adults at camp than ever before, including social work personnel who help staff with camper concerns. And for more than five years, Eisner has partnered with the Baltimore Child Abuse Center to train staff on abuse prevention and recognition.

Today’s camp protocol also includes heightened supervision. In the 1990s, Isserles recalls the night-watch program involving just one staff member overseeing six or more bunks. Now there’s at least one staffer present in each bunk at lights out.

Once a chance to relive a camp with adult privileges, being a counselor today carries weightier responsibilities. Campers, too, have less freedom to mess around.

Once a chance to relive the camper experience with adult privileges, being a counselor today carries far weightier responsibilities. Campers, too, have less freedom to mess around: At Eisner, they sign a code of conduct, with consequences ranging from warnings to being sent home for behaviors such as breaking camp rules or damaging property. “While camp needs to be a place where campers grow and are able to make mistakes,” Isserles says, “there still needs to be a level of accountability.”

This shift isn’t unique to Avoda, Eisner, or even Massachusetts. It’s happening all across camps in the Northeast. When Oest was a camper at Camp Speers YMCA, most of her time between programming was spent roaming around camp freely with friends, and much of the programming relied on campers transporting themselves from one activity to the next. By the time she was a staff member in the early 2010s, she says there was “no way” she’d ever send campers to travel across camp, no matter the distance, without a staff member by their side. She thinks changes like these reflect societal attitudes toward child supervision. “When my mom was growing up, she was given free rein of the neighborhood,” she says. “But now we live in a fearful world.”

There’s another, more practical reason for the changes: Summer camp, as an industry, relies on parental trust to stay afloat. And since most are nonprofits, they also have boards of directors to please. Changes—including those that alter the unsupervised, chaotic experience previous generations knew camp to be—are made when these key stakeholders fear for child safety or potential scandal.

But is there any point in attending camp under such strict supervision? Some of the Ramah boys don’t think so. David, for his part, begged his parents not to send his siblings, who are now 13 and 16.

Still, maybe there is some value in today’s summer sleepaway experience. Sophie Rossman, 16, started attending my camp in Canada when she was seven. Her parents met there when they were 18 and have been married for more than 20 years. She began camp at a time when she couldn’t visit friends in other bunks without a staff member escorting her, tent-hopping was outlawed, and curfews were enforced. And up until her 2023 staff-in-training summer, the rules continued to tighten. There are no more of the “date night” evening programs we used to enjoy (too heteronormative), and no more staff-written plays (too many innuendos).

Meanwhile, two years since her last summer as a camper, and one year until she returns as a counselor, Rossman tells me that her camp friends are like family, and that her years spent there have made her a better person socially. She’s learned how to live on her own, she says, and to resolve conflicts.

I remember watching my group of 11-year-old campers one July afternoon, as the Okanagan desert heat climbed to a blistering 103 degrees. The dining hall was a sweaty disaster, but they were undeterred, hauling high-pitched cheers like “OOH, AAH, YOU WISH YOU WERE IN CHALUTZIM!” across the hall. Almost none of them touched their tortellini, opting instead for juice boxes as their major food group. Their cheeks were flushed with sunburn, but I could see their joy, pure and unfiltered. No roof-climbing missions or late-night food fights required—just kids, free from their screens, realizing their own version of summer freedom.

An earlier version of this article was first published in the print edition of the July 2025 issue with the headline: “Camp Buzzkill.”