Camp is back! 'This is a summer of healing for our kids'

Beth Greenfield·Senior Editor Yahoo Life Article May 13, 2021· The bucolic scene at a YMCA camp for kids in need, in Canton, Mass., as pictured in July of 2016. Families are rejoicing over the reopening of most summer camps this summer after they were shuttered because of the pandemic.

The bucolic scene at a YMCA camp for kids in need, in Canton, Mass., as pictured in July of 2016. Families are rejoicing over the reopening of most summer camps this summer after they were shuttered because of the pandemic.

(Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Last year at this time, parents around the country who had been accustomed to sending their kids off to summer camp were beginning to realize, with a sinking feeling, that their much-anticipated plans would be sidelined, leaving a whole lot of kids disappointed.

"They would both tell you that camp is best part of their entire year — better than Christmas, vacations, the sports that they play," Abby Chau of New Hampshire tells Yahoo Life of her teenage son and daughter, who have been repeat campers at YMCA Camp Coniston since grade school.

But last year, with Coniston, which is located in Grantham, New Hampshire, closed due to the pandemic like most summer camps across the country, including 80 percent of the YMCA's 231 overnight camps, it just wasn't in the cards.

"I think we all suffered many blows last spring… my daughter was in 8th grade and her D.C. trip was canceled, her field trips were canceled — then lacrosse, then the dance, one thing after another, canceled. And camp being canceled just frosted that terrible cake," Chau recalls. "I don't want to be overly dramatic, because people have suffered so much in the last year, and we're not at the top of that list. But when you're younger, that perspective is hard to come by."

Recalls Coniston CEO John Tilley,

"Last year, we were feeling what every person in the country was feeling: anxious and afraid, and sad for what we had lost. We didn’t know where we were going."

Kids dash into the pond at the Old Colony YMCA Summer Camp in Massachusetts. (Photo: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Which is why this year's news that most sleep-away camps and day camps will indeed be open, with safety protocols in place, is bringing such relief and happiness, including to Chau's kids, who are "overjoyed," she says.

"The difference is amazing," Tilley tells Yahoo Life, "because we can see the light at the end of the tunnel — and last year we were just going into the tunnel."

The summer of 2020 left most camps closed, some operating at lower capacity, and plenty of families feeling bereft.

"We got tremendous feedback on the ones we did operate, but the impact on mental health and overall wellbeing for kids was significantly impacted without camp, especially after they didn't have school in normal ways," Paul McEntire, COO of YMCA of the USA (Y-USA), tells Yahoo Life.

There are 231 Y overnight camps nationwide (as well as more than 10,000 day camps), at which 30 percent of campers attend with some sort of financial aid. And this year, the Y camps and most privately operated ones are back.

"This is a summer of healing for our kids," Tom Rosenberg, president and CEO of the national nonprofit camp accreditor American Camp Association, tells Yahoo Life, noting that studies have found kids to be more "anxious, depressed, isolated and disconnected" due to COVID. "We've all been robbed by this pandemic, and so many people have passed. But I believe kids have really been robbed most of all. Not nearly enough has been said about their social and emotional losses." It's why this summer, he believes, is a "critical" time for regaining and relearning.

Summer camp (Photo: YMCA of the USA)"

When you're growing up, you form your own identity through the reflection of your peers… you're testing out who you want to be, starting to form your own attitudes," says Rosenberg, who was a camp director for 27 years before leading the ACA. "Camp is a place where kids learn those things… especially since parents are now bubble-wrapping kids more than ever before… and most were already emotionally vulnerable, pre-COVID."

McEntire agrees that the social skills gained at camp are needed now more than ever.

"Being outdoors, with friends, is always great for their development, their self-confidence, their learning — and now magnify that because they've not had that in significant ways in the last year and a half," he says. "T