“How Parents Ruined Summer Camp”
By Carl Heegaard
Please read the following article taken from The New Yorker Magazine – The Cut July 2025: “From Bug Spray to Balenciaga: How Parents Ruined Sleepaway Camp”
From Campfires to Chanel: How Wealth and Social Media Ruined Summer Camp
By Carl Heegaard
There was a time when summer camp was about kids escaping their parents.
Camp gave children independence, resilience, and a chance to figure out who they were without constant adult oversight. Parents sent their kids off with a duffel bag, a flashlight, and maybe a stack of letters ready to mail. Visiting day? A simple picnic on the grass.
Today? That entire ethos is dead—steamrolled by status anxiety, social media culture, and the endless parental arms race for “best experience ever.”
If you read the recent article on modern visiting days at elite Maine camps, you probably had the same reaction I did: disbelief, then disgust. The piece details parents flying private jets for an eight-hour drive, booking luxury hotels a year in advance, and sprinting across fields in Chanel sneakers with sushi platters and $3,000 candy towers. This is not a parody. It’s real life. And it’s a symptom of something much bigger: we’ve lost the meaning of summer camp—and maybe childhood itself.
What Summer Camp Used to Be
In the 1950s and 60s, camps were a sanctuary of simplicity. No smartphones, no curated Instagram feeds, no parents hovering nearby. It was the antidote to overbearing parenting long before “helicopter parent” entered the lexicon.
Kids spent their days learning to canoe, play sports, or belt out songs around a campfire. They got mosquito bites and bragged about them like badges of honor. If you missed your parents, you wrote a letter home and waited patiently for a reply.
Camp built independence, grit, and social skills. It taught kids to adapt without creature comforts and without a parent smoothing every bump in the road.
Fast Forward: The Coachella-ification of Visiting Day
Today, that spirit has been replaced by luxury pageantry masquerading as parenting.
Visiting Day has gone from “we missed you” to a competitive sport—and social media is the referee.
Here’s what it looks like now:
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The Arrival: Moms and dads descend on Maine in a fleet of Escalades, Rivians, and G-Wagons. Many fly private jets. One parent in the article casually mentioned being offered a helicopter ride.
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The Outfit: Moms show up in “effortlessly casual” uniforms: designer jean shorts, Loewe tanks, Chanel sneakers—plus a fresh blowout because God forbid you ruin your Instagram photo by looking like you’ve been outdoors.
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The Gifts: Forget the single tote bag camps recommend. Parents find creative ways to max out the rules with personalized bunk gifts, Alo Yoga sets, Nike Dunks, and yes, sushi platters. One mom spent $3,000 on a candy tower that was confiscated within hours because food attracts rodents.
And the pressure doesn’t end there. Restaurants near these camps book out months in advance. Hotels jack up prices and require three-night minimum stays. Parents openly admit setting alarms to snag reservations the moment they open—because nothing says “family bonding” like an 8-hour drive and a dinner reservation war.
It’s Not About the Kids Anymore
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Visiting Day isn’t really for the kids. It’s for the parents.
It’s about optics. It’s about keeping up in the Instagram highlight reel of modern parenting. Who sprinted the fastest? Who had the best reunion photo? Who delivered the most jaw-dropping bunk gifts?
There’s even an app, Campanion, where parents obsessively scroll through photos camps upload. Visiting Day has become a real-world extension of that digital obsession—a chance to curate the perfect, envy-inducing moment.
One mom in the article admitted: “That weekend, visiting day takes over my feed.” That says it all.
The Emotional Fallout
Here’s the cruel twist: Kids often hate visiting day.
They think they want the candy towers and swag, but what they really want is time with their parents—time that now competes with photo ops and social media updates. And after all the hype, the goodbye is crushing.
During COVID, when visiting days were canceled, camps reported something surprising: Kids adjusted better. Parents confessed they were relieved too. No drama. No chaos. No emotional whiplash. Some even said those were the best summers ever.
Think about that: The best summers happened when the performance was canceled.
What We’ve Lost
Summer camp used to strip away privilege and status. Everyone wore the same T-shirt, slept on the same bunk, and shared the same mosquito bites. Today, it’s a luxury brand experience disguised as tradition.
Parents who claim they want to give their kids “the best” are robbing them of the one thing camp was designed to provide: freedom from parental interference.
Instead of building resilience, we’re building dependency—and worse, teaching kids that every experience is a photo op.
Here’s the Hard Truth
If you’re booking private planes and curating visiting-day outfits like it’s Fashion Week, you’re not doing it for your kid. You’re doing it for validation—from peers, from Instagram, from yourself.
So, here’s my plea:
Let camp be camp again. Leave the sushi and Chanel sneakers at home. Send your kid to camp with a duffel bag and a flashlight. Let them scrape their knees, make friends, and learn to solve problems without a concierge parent on speed dial.
Because if summer camp just becomes another stage for competitive parenting, then maybe the ones who really need a break in the woods aren’t the kids—it’s the parents.
