Childcare: Let’s face it. I’ve got work to do. While I’m lucky to have a flexible job and kids easy to entertain, I do need to spend time in the lab, meet with students, and concentrate. I need to have my kids off and doing something away from me a good portion of the hours of the weekday, most weeks of the summer. I can make a few 9 am-3:30 camps work, but not too many. Seriously, who can go to these? That leaves just 6.5 hours, minus commute time.
Cost: Sorry, but $500 per week for a day camp isn’t worth it for me under almost any circumstance. My daughter has her eye on a 3-week residential camp that will cost just over $4000. I choked when I saw the cost.
Low stress: My kids find school stressful. It’s noisy, a lot of kids talk about things that don’t interest them, and they spend a lot of time occupying their minds without getting into trouble. The misfit between my kids and school is sufficient that I really do look to give them a genuine break from those demands. Not every day of my child’s life needs to be spent meeting social or intellectual needs. Sometimes, we just gotta back off and let them be.
In the category of “high stress” environments for my kids are those park-run camps with a zillion kids running every which way, overseen by fun-loving college students. That environment is their 7th circle of hell. It’s too bad as they are cheap, consistent, open all day, and walking distance from home.
Social Growth: We’ve found that my kids experience the most social growth when they interact with other kids who see the world through a similar lens as they do. While it’s too bad that they don’t go to school with many such kids, those times we’ve been able to find that sort of social environment for my kids has been freeing for them. They realize that while they might be alone in their class or school, they are not alone in the world. We see the gains transfer back to school. We therefore have sought out camps for gifted kids.
We don’t have any camps for gifted kids here.
Having these goals clearly in mind have made it easier to plan the summer effectively. Just cue up that cheap, full day, close to home, intellectually enriching camp experiences with a bunch of gifted kids. Ha!
Since that doesn’t exist, we look for day camps that will tend to attract intellectually engaged kids. As my kids start outstripping their teachers in history and science content knowledge in early elementary school, we seek out camps where the leaders have significant subject knowledge. We’ve found this in a lot of places, and it takes a lot of searching. We’ve found good programs through the children’s museum, historical society, the Autobahn Society, and 4H. Our local university runs music camps, a variety of STEM camps. The university also hosts private companies that use the university space to run robotics and programming camps that are hit or miss (though $$. Ouch). We’ve also found good things through the local private schools that run summer enrichment programs.
Now that my daughter has gotten to middle school, she’s discovered that a camp that forces her to write a paragraph about why she wants to go effectively sorts out the kids that want to be there from the kids whose parents sign them up. And, now that she’s old enough to spend time away from home for camp, there are week long camps for gifted kids some distance off, but I think we need a new line in the family budget for those. Hopefully they’re worth it. She’ll be going to two this summer.