“I am really not interested in my kids coming home from camp,” Dara Kass, MD, an emergency medicine doctor and vocal vaccine proponent, posted on Facebook in late July. I can’t say I feel differently. Thanks to the emergence of the Delta variant, the threat of Lambda, and now the mention of Kappa and Iota and Eta, tracking the Coronavirus is starting to sound like sorority rush week. Sarcasm aside, campers return home this week to a world they not only needed to leave behind them, but in many ways believed that they already had.
Our kids have been betrayed.
When my 13-year-old daughter hopped on her camp bus in late June, the face masks she and other vaccinated campers wore seemed due more to an abundance of caution than a real fear that Covid would infect anyone on board. Sure, she’d need to mask up again when school restarted. But otherwise, not so much. My fully vaccinated family had been to the movies and had dined out indoors. We enjoyed Immersive Van Gogh without fear. We breathed freely on buses and subways. We knew the pandemic wasn’t over, but the finish line – we could see it.
Then, while our kids were at camp, blissfully unaware, the finish line moved.
The threat of Covid aside, this summer has been anything but smooth for many camps, what with labor, supply and food shortages, prolonged homesickness, and counselor walk-outs. Anecdotally, I’ve heard about more campers leaving early than ever before. As much as kids wanted and needed camp, after 16 months of living in virtual isolation, some couldn’t handle it — the normal course of their social emotional growth thwarted by the pandemic. Plus, in the absence of Visiting Day at many camps, they missed their parents.
“We were prepared for kids to come to camp with more mental health challenges than in previous summers,” says Tom Rosenberg, president of the American Camping Association. But having lost more than a year of routine social interaction, many children simply weren’t ready to be thrust into a group living situation where some campers were sloppy while others were not, where some talked deep into the night while others wanted to sleep. “I think we were a bit overly optimistic about the true impact this pandemic has had on all of us, not just the campers, but also staff and leadership.”
In camp lingo, many campers, at least in the first few weeks, were acting out with excessive emotional reactivity — an intolerance of others, diminished empathy, and sometimes physical aggression. (One boys camp leader described campers in the first week as ‘feral.’) In other words, there was more hitting, hurting, and crying than usual. There were also more eating disorders, panic attacks, and campers (and counselors) behaving badly. “Some camp directors are considering a different career,” says Rosenberg, joking but not joking.
Yet for the kids who made it through – that’s most of them – they enjoyed the spoils of life inside of a (mostly) Covid-free zone where they could sing, sport and hug without worry. Yes, many had difficulty adjusting. But eventually they settled in, and settled down. And therein lies the magic of camp: the chance for children and teens to navigate differences and conflict without parents coaching from the sidelines, or the distractions of technology, and create deep, lasting bonds that Rosenberg insists build armor against the school year ahead, and “prepares them for life.”
Campers got to do this because, in large part, vaccinated or not, they weren’t too worried about getting sick. While in the back offices and health centers, camp staff were fortifying protocols to keep Delta at bay, in the bunks, on the playing fields, and along the waterfront, children continued to behave like children.
“We thought vaccination would afford us the opportunity to pop the bubble,” says pediatrician Laura Blaisdell, MD, who led a CDC study of four camps that opened during summer 2020, and consults with camps nationwide. “Then Delta came on the scene, and we started seeing counselors coming back [from their days off] with exposures. Camps that had been focused on protecting their unvaccinated campers and staff all of a sudden had to protect the vaccinated as well. “
The good news: kids didn’t seem to notice. In most cases when campers or staff tested positive, they were instantly isolated. Anyone exposed to them was relegated to activities with just their pod, often without other campers even knowing. “While we saw more vaccinated people test positive during camp, staff responded quickly to mitigate the spread.”
Whereas in Summer 2020, Kass insisted that camp needed to be cancelled, this year she predicted that “camp will be the first place in America where herd immunity is achieved.” She may have been right.
So now what? The waning weeks of summer once held promise of a more Covid-safe life than these campers left behind, especially important for those children too young to be vaccinated who don’t yet have any protection against the virus outside of the vigilance of their parents. “I promised my kids we would go to the movies when they got back, to Great Adventure,“ one dad shared with me. “Now I’m wondering how to make that happen.”
Blaisdell says she’s been advising camps to prepare campers for what’s waiting for them. And she advises parents to have honest conversations with their children when they get home, so together they can adapt to this new-old-new normal. “The best thing you can do is to help them apply their camp experience to their experiences in school,’ she says. What did they learn? she asks. What resiliency did they build?
I couldn’t wait to ask my daughter those questions and more the moment she stepped off of the camp bus and into the sweltering parking lot packed with eager parents, impatient siblings and attention-starved pets. But before we could stroll into a nearby Subway and catch up over sandwiches, there was something else we had to do.
I pointed to the newly re-affixed sign on the door to the restaurant.
Then I handed her a mask.