Raising Parents with Emily Oster - Episode Feature: How Camp Teaches Kids to Ditch Their Phones

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Hi Raising Parents listeners—we’ve got a special bonus episode I’m excited to share with you from Emily Oster’s feed, ParentData. It’s all about the greatness—and importance—of summer camp. Especially in 2025. Camp is one of the few places where kids get a permission slip to be off their phones. Where the kids—who don’t quite fit in at school—get a fresh start, and maybe even find their people. (Yes, Emily is talking about her personal revelation at math camp.) And it’s a kind of exposure therapy for parents, too, as they learn to be okay with unsupervised play. Emily Oster and Steve Baskin, a career camp director and incoming head of the American Camp Association, get into all of that and much more.

Hi, Raising Parents Listeners. Emily Oster here. I've got a special bonus episode I'm excited to share with you from my feed, Parent Data. It's all about the greatness and importance of summer camp, especially in 2025. Camp is one of the few places where kids get a permission slip to be off their phones, where kids who don't quite fit in at school get a fresh start and maybe even find their people. Yes, I'm talking about my personal revelation at MapCamp. And it's a kind of exposure therapy for parents, too.

Learning to be okay with a little unsupervised play. Today, me and Steve Baskin, a career camp director and incoming head of the American Camping Association, get into all of that and much more. Stay with us. Today it's sailing, Milo, Alina, and Anna all got their beginners. I'm Cardinals, Megan Gunker beginners at tennis. I'm Emily Astor. This is Parent Data. And today, we're going to camp. Okay, everybody you show me your bracelets.

How many bracelets am I looking at right now? A lot. Also, that's another thing about camp. You like give people a bunch of different bracelets. And I'll be like, oh, this one's from so and so, this one's from so. It's kind of like little memories you wear. Yeah, I've got two... Memories of people here.

The counselors had to really... If I make this shot, I get mixed dessert. Yeah. It's lunch time. Okay? Yay! Yay! Did my name did it?

Yeah. I remember camp for a few things. For the realization that it was okay to wear a sports bra on stage in a play, camp was the place that I learned to shave my legs, although no one told me that you should use shaving cream. And it was the place where I first kissed a boy. Camp is different. It's a place where you can be unselfconscious,

you can have pure fun in the woods. It's a place where you have camp friends. They're not the same as your school friends. And if you know, you know, and if you don't know, it's hard to explain. Okay, three, one, two, three. Underwear, underwear, how I itch from my woolen underwear. Oh, how I wish I had gotten some made of cotton, so I wouldn't itch the way I do from my gosh darn, gosh darn woolen underwear.

Hey! Camp is a place where you're a 12-year-old, your favorite activity, is sailing, and also you're an expert at it. It's fun. It just, like, depends on the wind. I was in there with three other people. Are any of them counselors? No.

Amazing. And especially now, camp's a place where you leave your screens and your phone at home, and you figure out, what do you do instead? We like to braid each other's hair. Explain what you have in your hands right now. Oh, technically I'm not supposed to have this, but I forgot to bring it, put it back in my cab. It's my string box.

A lot of people make bracelets here with string. So you just, like, buy a bunch of string and you, like, put it into knots and make bracelets. So I have my string. We're not just going to camp today. We're also going to talk to Steve Baskin. Steve Baskin is a director of three camps, one in Massachusetts, one in Texas, one in North Carolina,

and he's the incoming president of the American Camp Association. Steve loves camp. That will come across in this interview. And we're also going to talk about why he loves camp and why he thinks it's so important for kids. We'll talk about interpersonal skills, about camp as exposure therapy, about the importance of homesickness and of teaching resilience to kids and teaching them to be alone together. And we'll talk about phones and camp as one of the last places where kids don't have them and how kids react when you take away their phone. Spoiler, it goes fine. Not having my phone is like a part of camp.

And I think it really, like, especially this generation, it's like addicted to screens. And I find when I come back from camp, I don't have as big of an urge to pick up my phone constantly. I think because I'm, I've gotten used to being outside. I don't need to have my phone every, every minute to see, did somebody snap me? Did somebody send me in a message?

I think for any parent who's kids, Camp curious, any parent whose kid is Camp curious, any parent who's thinking about phones, and anyone who just loved Camp, this is one to listen to. Some advice for parents is send your kids to camp because they will be, like, less addicted to technology and more, like, outside and reading, and they will be happier when they return. After the break, Steve Baskin. Steve Baskin, thanks so much for joining me. I'm delighted to be here.

So you run a camp, and we are here to talk about summer camp. And I would love to have you introduce yourself, tell us about your camp, and then we can talk a little bit about why you've devoted your life to doing this. Okay. Well, I've been a camp professional for a little more than 30 years. I did it actually starting camp. I went to investment banking and consulting and business school before I alighted into summer camp. And I run a camp in Texas as well as a camp in North Carolina.

And I'm associated with a day camp outside of Boston as well. So I'm a full-time camp geek. We met during the pandemic when in that first pandemic summer, in which you actually operated a camp and I was thinking about camps and kids and we somehow connected. But it was very clear to me then and now and every time we've talked since then that this is something you think is really important. And I'd love to have you talk a little bit about why. Well, if I can indulge a story. Please. When I was eight years old, I was the younger brother of the local football star in Midland, Texas.

Right. And that's where Friday Night Lights was written about, you know, football of religion, only two sports that matter are football and spring football. And he was 5'8 and 140 pounds, which was nothing. And he was the all district center in the middle of the line. He blocked against the guys twice his weight, kept the football team. Everyone called the Mighty Mouse. The winning parade float had a mighty mouse with his jersey on it. Well, everyone who wanted me to follow in his footsteps, in regardless of the fact that I was a chronic asthmatic who's a little version of Bermudagrass. So I developed a image of myself as a failure as somebody who couldn't meet other people's expectations. And of course, my parents told me, you're not a failure. You're different for your brother. You're okay. But everyone else was giving me that look like, oh, bless his heart. And I really just felt like I was never going to measure up. And I went to camp, and at camp, I did not have an older brother.

At camp, I had a 19-year-old that made me feel like his life was somehow made complete because the skinny asthmatic eight-year-old was in it. and he met me, he listened to me, and I felt fully seen, and I went back and never worried about playing football again. So, let me also posit that I had as good appearance as someone could possibly hope to have. But they couldn't give me this third-party validation. They couldn't give me the knowledge that I was okay even if I wasn't a football player. So somewhere in the back of my eight-year-old mind, I saw camp as a place for transition. My mom used to say it's a place you can try on new versions of yourself. And I had a, I won't bore you with another story,

but when I was 15, I got the equivalent of like an Eagle Scout, and I became convinced I could do anything on my own, not with the help of my parents. So those two things informed me, my view, that camp was a place for massive transformation. It's so interesting because that anecdote is about, it's basically an anecdotal version of a, lot of what we see in the data, which is camp as a kind of sense of belonging. And as a, when we

look at trials or data on what happens with kids at camp, there is this piece that comes out very strongly of this being a place where kids, especially who are different in some other way from their peers, can connect with other people that they connect with better. And that that has very good emotional effects. Absolutely. Now, I'll also say I like also having the kids who aren't having trouble other places, and they get to come and then try out being kind. Sometimes the, you know, the aphas will learn that, hey, you're the top of the totem pole

and you don't have to acknowledge the people down below. A camp, that's not okay. So they're getting new narratives as well. Like sometimes I frame camp as a place to, develop new and better narratives. When the narratives that you've developed to that date are created by an ecosystem that you cannot change. I will tell you that I, one of the most formative experiences of my adolescence was the summer I went to camp after seventh grade. And I had had a very, very difficult social time, as you might imagine, middle school was not serving me well.

And I was very unhappy. And I went to a camp that involved doing math, day. So it was just like you did math all day. And for me, like that was what I wanted. I really liked doing math. And I, the first time my whole life, I was around other people who also wanted to do that. And for whom I could recreate as someone who was like, cool. I mean, I still remember I got invited to this, like at the end, some of the people I thought were cool at camp had like a final circle. And I was there. And I was like, that's it. Like I've, I, this is, this is. This is, my people. And then it was almost like it's going to be okay. Because I know these people are in the world. And one day, I'm going to find them again. It's not going to be the eighth grade, but it will

happen. And it was, it was really important. Well, and I bet also, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, once you sort of felt more comfortable, you didn't feel judged, you started to hone other interpersonal skills in an environment that wasn't being mediated by other adults. And when you came back, maybe you weren't, you know, as happy when you were in eighth grade, but you were marginally better and interacting with people even outside of your milieu. Yeah. Yeah, it's an unusual circumstance to put a kid in a place where they don't have an adult to scaffold and they don't really know anybody else and say, you know, figure out, figure out

these relationships, figure out this environment by yourself. Actually, you just said something, too, that I'm going to share one of my geekier theories right now is that people are talking a lot about the developmental benefits of unsupervised free play. Right? Linares Cadiz talks a lot about this.

John Hype talks about this. I believe it entirely. Here's the thing. Parents aren't totally jazzed about the word unsupervised. What camp is, camp is an arbitrage. Camp is an opportunity

to get unusual benefits with unusually low risk. So in other words, for the kids' point of view, it's unsupervised food play because the 19-year-old's too cool to be an adult. Right. But they're actually watched better than at home. And I can't remember exact stats, but I seem to recall that schools are twice as safe as homes and camps are five times safer than homes. I joke that I will let my kids play unsupervised, but I won't let yours. Right.

But again, who's supervising? Supervising by these super cool 19-year-olds that see you. So it does not feel like a judging parent. And also, they're watching 10 kids, not one. So they let the kids spread their wings a little bit. They let them go a little further in disagreeing about the rules of a game of Gaga without marching in and saying, no, here's how we're going to do it. So the kids can adjudicate their own issues.

And the supervisors only step in when you're beyond the bounded range of what is actually safe. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. it's interesting because I think that this, as you know this conversation about kind of unsupervised play has come up a lot lately. And I think one issue for many parents is going from where we are now, which is a lot of kids, you know, they're not walking to school on their own. They're not really going out by themselves. Going from that to like my kids should just play in the woods by themselves and come back at dinner time is a bridge too far. And that's, that's too difficult

to do. And the idea that maybe there's a way to get some of that, an intermediate way. Yeah. Campus exposure therapy. bike child went away I didn't watch them every moment and they didn't just come back okay they came back better huh so maybe with the right friend

I can let them go play you know at a park for a couple hours and then come back and you know maybe I'll have a few of the neighbors look at the window to make sure they're okay but I'm not going to be the one there and eventually you can start to recreate something closer to what we had

when we grew up yeah yeah and I think exposure therapy on this stuff is a nice way to put it because it does get easier the second time. The second time you let your kid walk around the block by themselves, it's easier than the first time. And some of those are just getting over the barrier of, you know, how worried we are about our kids for a good reason, but not always to their benefit. I've developed the hypothesis that there are sort of two pools of parental effort. Pool number one is protect and provide. and pool number two is prepare and when you're holding that baby in your arms you better be 100% in the protected

provide you're not in preparation you're not whispering them about the secrets of the world you're just making sure they're okay but by the time they're 21, 25 I hope you're 100% in the prepare and not in the protected provide and it almost seen them as sort of crossy lines on a graph the amount of parental time

but we don't see that what we see is we we don't want to let go of the protect mode. And it makes sense because our neighbors aren't. And we feel negligent. We feel when people look at it as like, oh, yeah, Emily really doesn't like her kids. Look, she's letting him go do this. And it's hard to have the confidence in yourself to say, no, no, I know this is what will make my children strong. Right. And that's just hard. So I want to talk a little bit about screens because the other thing that comes up, probably the most in the parents that I talk to, particularly with older kids, is stuff about phones. It actually overlaps some with these issues of independence,

and especially with the anxious generation discussions, parents are concerned about their kids' phone use. And Camp is often one of the few places that kids are where phones are not. And so I want, first, can you just tell us what the screen phone policy is at your camp. There are none. And when people, can you just like say a little more about what you mean by none? What that means is that they might see a movie. We might project up a movie on movie night, maybe. I'm not be sure we have movie night this term, right? They will not have a phone. They will not have a game system. They will not look at a computer. A few of the kids in high school, one of their activities is working on our media team, so they might take some photos and post them up.

but that's it. The only other time they will see anything that looks like an electronic screen is if you were a high school kid and you're part of our high school leadership program and will bring you into the house and maybe show you a TED talk of the importance of not being addicted to screens, right? Just as a starting place. Other than that, it's 10,000 minutes without looking at any kind of electronic screen. and tell me what happens a kid shows up at camp they give you their their phone and i'm curious how they react to this you know it must have been really interesting to watch the the trend about six years ago you would have felt like you were taking the ring from gollum and lord the ring so the kids are like grasping onto them some of them will bring second phones i had a parent one time ship a phone inside of a teddy bear. Oh my gosh. How did you find it?

It started to ring as we were handed it to the child, which I actually thought was pretty delicious. Anyway, but now we get a small number of first-time campers for whom the phone is a social crutch that when they're not quite sure what to do, they could go down and look at it as if something really important is happening. It is something that when they're bored, they could stay entertained. By the way, I'm a big fan of boredom.

I'm not boring with all my theories there, but I really want kids to daydream some. But they are used to at every moment being able to have music or a distraction or something that keeps them from sort of sitting with themselves. Those first-time campers break up into kind of two different groups.

One is there's like a day where they're not quite sure. And then they go, wait a second. This kind of talking to people face-to-face and having to laugh at my jokes is awesome. and wow actually get to put my arm around a friend or give him a hug and there's some importance I don't know all the neurology about this but there's an importance of physical contact that just knowing that other person is there so most the kids fall in that category there are

some kids that I would put into the they're actually kind of addicted category and you just have to love them through it right now the returners this is entirely different they're like ohmg I love this because for most teens, the phones have gone from a liberating element to almost a burden. If you do not respond quickly to your friend's Instagram posts with glowing praise as rapidly as possible, you're not a good friend. So now you have this call on your time in the pocket, text and messages and Instagrams and all the stuff that you have to respond to to be a good friend. And suddenly they go, oh, I could tell all my friends. that my camp director is a jerk. It doesn't let me have a phone. But secretly, I'm delighted to

not have to deal with it anymore. There's a, I had a discussion yesterday with 30 high schoolers. And they're like, I just love this. I just don't know how to recreate it back home. Yeah. So I'm curious about that because it seems like the central piece of this is that the other people around you are not doing it. So both they're physically not doing it. And then they have no expectation that you will be interacting with them like that. And I'll throw one other thing out there. The counselors aren't either. Right.

So the young kids, especially the young kids, get to see adults not addicted to their phones. I'll actually say that if a counselor has a phone in the presence of a child, they're doing harm because their job is to be the one exemplar of somebody who doesn't need it. Right. But you've identified the biggest issue. It's a collective action problem. Yeah. So it's collective action at camp.

No one has it. In fact, if I were to give a phone to just one of those kids, they would be incredibly self-conscious looking at it. Right. Because nobody has it. So we spend a lot of time thinking about how do you address the collective action problem? Now you know what it feels like to be present with another human being. You know what it feels like to have a real connection and not a virtual connection. How can you create an environment in which that can happen at some level on a regular basis at home?

do you have ideas well i had one of the uh young women say i have a group of friends and we agree at least twice a week to do an hour and a half thing maybe we go to eat maybe we just go to the park but we don't even take the phones with it so we can't even reach for them and i thought wow that's super cool because there's a group of people they are being social together and none of them can be tempted yeah other people all say hey look i will not do any text or email phone after eight o'clock at night. So, you know, maybe blame me your parents. But I'm not going to be connecting then. If you want to call me, maybe you can call me, but I'm not going to connect in this way. Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit of a,

the, the, there's a message, a little bit of a message for parents in here that in some sense, the boundary of, you know, my camp director is a jerk and, well, maybe on my phone is a version that one could imagine, you know, especially for a younger team, being able to say, look, we're just not on our phones after 7 p.m. And you should tell your friends, your parents said, you know, your phone is not available after 7 p.m. And they shouldn't expect to hear from you. Absolutely. But I think there's another step. There's a book coming out from a psychology professor in New York, Texas called David Yeager. And he posits that the primary motivation in force for teenagers is status and respect. Sounds right. So there's not quite as much status in say, my parents tell me I can't use the phone.

If there is status and say, hey, I'm really tired of the idea that I am a product that is being sold to advertisers. And the idea that if I want to be on Instagram Reels for 30 minutes, but I'm on for two hours, that means I just made Mark Zuckerberg-Ritcher. You know, we together need to have a frame where we will not be slaves to our phones. So what are we, I'm talking now a group of 16-year-olds, what are we going to do to make sure that we own our phones? they don't own us. And I think that's going to be the key to get the collective action thing going is creating a frame where it's not the parents trying to take the phone away because that is not giving them status. That's not giving them respect. And it goes against their desire to individuate. But instead you say, no, look, these companies don't care about

you. You are the product. That's interesting. And we frame it this way, that works. And I know actually one of my sons used to do the same when they go out to a meal or something. They put the phones in the middle. And everyone's always heard that if you reach for your phone, you pay for it. You know, if you're used the phone, you pay for it. But there's no real status in that because your parents are paying for. It's not like you're shelling it out.

No, he says, if you reach for your phone, you're weak. No, but think about the frame. It's so simple. Yeah. And you would think they were made of radioactive uranium. No one reached for them at all because no one wanted to be weak. No one wants to be weak. Sure. So what we need to do is help create a frame.

And I do this with my high school kids, but that I mean my high school leadership program, that you don't want to be slaves to, you know, TikTok or the companies. You want to have agency. You have to be the leader that creates a frame within your community that gives you ownership as opposed to being owned. How are you going to do that? And they're so like, yeah, put me in coach.

I like that. What does it like as it be without phones? It's actually kind of nice. I really like it. I really like I feel like I wouldn't bond with people any mere as much as I do if there were phones. Because I feel like I'm closer with a lot of people here than with people at home that I've known for longer. I don't stress about what's going on around the world or my friends. friends it's just like people here and if something happens I just talk about with my

friends and it's not really a big deal a lot of people like assume that sucks but I actually enjoy it more because I feel like it like gives me like a cleanse or whatever like from the outside world that like I definitely need yeah I feel like I have a lot more fun because like I'm not worrying about stuff like I'm just not through to a screen all day like people know I feel it's easier to like actually focus and like have more fun and when you're not like electronics and stuff also like if you don't have your phone on you, some people are, like, worrying about, like, what their friends are doing or being, like, left out. At camp, since I don't have my phone, I'm just, like, having more

fun with my camp friends than I would at home. It's easier to, like, make friends and stuff. You make better connections with people. I think I'm closer with my camp friends and my friends at school. Yes, same. Yeah, me too. More parent data, including why homesickness is a feature of camp life, not a bug after the break. Okay, so we're going to, all right. Now, I want to get back to the camp piece of this, because whenever I talk to you about this, I'm just like, how can everyone go to camp? And I think that many parents will also get here and think, like, yes, this sounds amazing.

There's no phones. everybody feels their belonging. But even if I'm not concerned about my kids' safety, which I think many parents can get over, people are going to worry about their kids being homesick. And I'm going to send my kid to this camp, and they haven't been away from me very much, maybe not at all. And I'm afraid they'll be sad. And so I'd love to start by just asking, like our kids sat. Absolutely. Okay.

Home is a nice place. Yeah. Have you ever traveled to a foreign country that doesn't speak your language and been absolutely comfortable the moment you arrived? No. I'm not. I need to figure out how to ask where the bathroom is, how I can, you know, get food, and, you change money.

Like, until that happens and maybe transportation, I'm not comfortable in a country that I don't speak the language. But I love to travel. and I have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable in order to get the wonderful experience of travel. Home is a wonderful place, but it's a place that does enable you to grow as much as environments that stretch you.

So I would suggest that homesickness is a feature, not a buck. Or put differently, there's some parents that go, hey, other kids can do this, but mine can't. But hold of she. She's 12. Okay, most kids could do three, four, weeks when they're eight. Okay, that's about 95% are going to be totally okay at age eight to go several weeks. If you tell your 12 year old, they can't do it. And then you ask them when

you want to do it. Well, in the 13, well, other people can do it. Maybe I can't. When are they ever going to know they can do that? And by the way, they're going to be going to college at some point. You think suddenly it's going to snap and go, oh, I couldn't go to camp for two weeks, but now I could go for nine months. Right. Back to the prepare and protect. There is the predict thing. Yes, they will have moments when they're a little bit sad and they'll be around other people having the same experience or people who've had that same experience with two counselors probably with eight nine 10 kids who have been trained on how to deal with homesickness and there's a whole array of techniques but just know this is one of the things that you have to do well if you're a

camp profession right and then what happens on the other side is wait I'm now the kind of kid that can be away from home and make friends and accomplish new skills and be spectacular without being in the shadow of my mom and dad, I still love them as much. In fact, I might love them a little bit more because they had enough confidence in me to take this risk. So I absolutely believe that homesickness, well, it's an exercise in anti-fragility. It's one of those things that puts us outside of her comfort zone that gives us evidence that we're more capable that we thought. Do you like kids call their parents? No. I mean, no. I wish you had your face when you said to answer that.

Well, I mean, it's a little bit like, okay, we've just got them somebody, that's a terrible analogy. If someone has just gotten off of using their phone, they've now learned, I'm not constantly looking at my hand or look at my pocket for the phone. Would you then reintroduce it after three days? Hearing a parent's voice in about 19 out of 20 cases will only make homesickness worse. Now, what's the 20th case? The 20th case is the parent who needs to say, no, I'm not going to come get you. And by the way, here's the thing that I've learned about kids. And this is true at about, you know, 999 out of 1,000 cases. So I have maybe two campers of 2000 a summer that this does not apply to.

Is that once they know the option's not there, they will redirect their energy. They're not fools, right? Now, they're, but they're really, really good at being persistent. So they'll try their counselor, then they'll try the divisulator, then they'll try a director. And sometimes we just have to be, look, I'm telling you, you're not going to call home. And they go, okay. And then they adjust. And very, very, very rarely, the parent has to say, actually, sweetheart, I'm not going to come get you.

Have a good time. But that's super rare. Do you ever have kids leave? Yeah. I'll have one or two leave a summer. But what's, you're my mathematician. What's two in 2000? You know, 0.01%.

It's small. Yeah. Do you encourage kids to write to their, I, this is like a very practical thing, but do you encourage kids to write to their parents? I do. I do. And that, by the way, is, I believe it's developmentally appropriate. By the way, boys almost never write. And when they do write, they write the letter I wrote. And for parents listening, remember, I am now a full-time camp official. But I was eight years old. Remember the asthmatic kid. And the letter I wrote to my parent, mom, I got some water on my hand and dripped it on the page. And I wrote, dear mommy, I had not called her mommy in like two years. Dear mommy, the stains on this page are the tears that are falling from my eyes. If you truly love me, you'd come and get me. One of my friends got that letter last year. I actually write that to the parents to say,

do you might get this letter? Well, my mom calls to camp, has a laugh. It doesn't do anything. Why? Because my two older siblings had done all this 10 years earlier. And she knew that I'm writing this during rest period when nothing else is going on and I'm not thinking about the fun activities.

I'm thinking about home. And I'm getting a little maruminating. And I'm melodramatic. So I write this. They called up and said, is he okay? Yeah, I've seen him. He smile at all the time. No, you know, evidence of massive despondency.

Nope, doing great. Fine. She saved the letter. That's nice. Very high quality parenting right there. So, again, I see, let me back up again, if you come and rescue your child. If you tell your child, if you're uncomfortable at a sleepover, for example, I will come and get you. I see it comes from a place of love.

It comes from a place of a, I do not want you to suffer at all. I don't want you to feel scared. But if you're the only one that's being rescued, and I say this with love to any parent listening to it, your child gets the message that they aren't able to deal with it. If I cut your meat for you, Emily, every time you ate, you would think I'm sending the message that I don't think you can cut your own meat.

If I rush and open the door and do everything, for you at some point you had to go hey buddy i am an adult human being i don't need you to do things for me if you do things for people all the time especially when they see other people aren't being scaffolded as much they will get the message that they're not capable and i know parents don't want to hear this but that is unquestionably the message they get is other kids might be able to do camp they might be able to do a sleepover but you my sweet delicate it chide a doll, you can't. And again, I hope this doesn't sound like a jerk.

No, I actually think it's incredibly important to hear, you know, in part because I just think we aren't as parents, for good reason, comfortable living with our kids being sad. And in some ways, I think we're looking, people are looking in this for answers like, well, you know, when your kid goes to camp, like there's some, or, there's some situation in which they're not, like they're never having any discomfort. And sure, some kids are going to show up and be like, this is great. I'm not homesick. But the recognition that many kids will show up, they will have some discomfort, they will be a

little sad, and it is still the right thing. Holding that together is so crucial. I'm going to say something that I would not actually say to a parent, but it's like, hey, my child was homesickness. I want to say, you're welcome. Yeah. They got on the other side, and now they're better for it, right? You know, oh, and they had an argument with one of their cabin mates.

You're welcome. They're going to have an argument with a roommate someday. But they adjudicated it on their own. They learned that you could disagree with somebody and be friends with them later. Right. Here's the little secret about camp is camp is a place that's challenging a lot of different ways. I will try an activity and fail at it. And then I'll learn through tenacity I can later succeed.

I'll try an activity and fail at it and never succeed. I could set a goal to dunk a basketball and it ain't going to happen. I can set that goal. I have to learn there's some things I can't do. I'll have friends, cabin base I don't like. I'll have days. I was looking forward to activity.

It rained. And all these little inconveniences are ones I learned to deal with. It keeps fun enough. And the relationship is strong enough that it makes it all okay. Right? But I'm a big fan of the guy who wrote the Black Swan. I forget his name right. It talks about antifagility.

Yeah. Is that if we act like perpetual, we will develop, I think if you want your kid not to be sad, you need them to have moments of sadness and get on the other side of it. If you make sadness the ultimate theme to be feared, when they finally do experience it later in life, they will see it as maybe even an existential threat as opposed to, oh, I've been sad before and I know I can come out the other side of it. Right. I really just believe that having evidence that you can have a difficulty and be made better for it, in fact, the definition of fragility is those things that are stressful and strainedful that make a system better. So immune systems or muscles or bones or the human spirit, are things that are anti-fragile. I have a very practical question. One of my favorite academic papers about camp is a randomized trial of trying to get boys at a a sleepaway camp to brush their teeth.

And they found that if you limited swim time, unless they had proven that they brushed their teeth, that encouraged toothbrushing. Is my kid going to brush his teeth at camp? Please say yes. Yes. No, look, we have learned there are very small handful of things that cannot be forgiven.

A parrot will forgive if an eight-year-old boy wears the same shirt three days in a row. They're not going to forgive if they wear the same pair of underwear three days if they don't shower it a week, mom's going to notice, right? So it's not just that it's the right thing to do to teach them responsibility. It's that that's a baseline of care. We've got to make sure they're healthy and safe. And part of that is basic hygiene. Okay. I'm relieved. So I have one last question, which is you've been doing this for 30 years. What are the biggest changes over time, either in kids or parents?

I think one of the big trends is back to the protect and provide versus prepare. I think we've dialed down preparation, dialed up protection. I think I can say that with absolute certainty. I'll also say that the level of professionalism in camps have gone way, way up. When I came in the industry 30 years ago, if you looked at brochure, it was like a carnival cruise line. We've got archery. We've got canoeing. Here are the activities we do.

And it might be 24 pages, 22 of which is, here's stuff you get to do. Now, a well-crafted message about camp is, here are the hero role models we're going to have as counselors. Here's what your child's going to learn. Here are values. At our campus, it's responsibility, respect, reaching out, reasonable risk, and resilience. The four or five hours, depending on if it's the camp in Texas or the camp in North Carolina. So there is an overall sort of youth development professionalism that has come in. You'll not be surprised to have camp directors who know who Emily Oster is, as opposed to just, you know, who's like a really, really good person to teach the breaststroke.

Right. So I think we've just really elevated our game in terms of creating safe, healthy environments that enable kids to grow. Thank you, Steve. Tell people where they can find you if they're dying to send their kids to your camp. Okay, well, one camp is called Camp Champions. It's outside of Austin, Texas. The other one is called Camp Pinnacle. It is outside of Ashkel,

and the day camp is in Sharon, Massachusetts. But either camp, we welcome to come to the website and send us an email, and if you're interested in camp, we recommend it. But also, I'm the incoming chair of the American Camp Association. So what I would say to anyone here is find a camp that's right for you. Not all camps. Your camps are more expensive than I'd like to be because you have to make a whole year's worth of work done in seven, eight, nine weeks.

But there are, there's a whole array of costs of camp. And there are camps for everybody. It might be a math camp for a budding young Ph.D. Might be a math camp. Might be a math camp. Might be a music camp. Might just be a regular camp in the woods. Absolutely.

Thank you so much, Steve. I really appreciate it. And thank you, Emily, for being a voice to talk with camp. And I will thank you one other thing. I'm not sure I'd have had the courage to run camp in 2020 if it weren't some of the conversation had with you and other people. Well, I'm sure the kids really, really appreciated that. Oh, as did the counselors.

It was a sanity saver. Don't worry about a thing, because every little thing, because every little thing is going to be all right. Special thanks today to for us to record their day and their awesome campers. Parent Data is produced by Tamara Avi Shai with support from the Parent Data team and PRX.

If you have thoughts on this episode, please join the conversation on my Instagram at Prof. Emily Oster. And if you want to support the show, become a subscriber to the Parent Data Newsletter at ParentData.org, where I write weekly posts on everything to do with parents and data to help you make better, more informed parenting decisions. For example, earlier this year, we published an article titled A Data-Driven Approach to Summer Camp, which not only tackles the data about the importance of camp, like we talked about today with Steve,

but also helps to manage all the logistics. One word, labels. Iron on, press on, just labels. Read all about it at parent data.org. There are a lot of ways you can help people find out about us. Leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. Text your friend about something you learned from this episode. Debate your mother-in-law about the merits of something parents do now

that is totally different from what she did. Post a story to your Instagram debunking a panic headline of your own. Just remember to mention the podcast too. Right, Penelope? Right, Mom. We'll see you next time. This is my message to you Say you don't worry about a thing

Because every little thing is going to be all right I can't wait. Nice job, guys. I can't wait to hear it at campfire if it sounds this awesome already. From PRX.