Warning: The Dangers of Camping with Your Children
How This Family Activity Can Forever Influence the Way Your Children Measure the Best Things in Life.
If only the outdoors came with the following disclaimer: Camping with your family can have long-term effects on children (and adults). Since it doesn’t, and since I’m a life-long camp-aholic, I think it’s only fair that I share some of the reasons parents should think long and hard about camping with their kids.
Sunday having been Father’s Day, many children will already feel the effects of going camping with their families this past weekend. It’s important that you understand what this can do to them—if you aren’t already aware.
First, let me share a little bit of my background, and how I’ve been affected. It’s safe to say that if you took your children camping this past weekend, you may have experienced something similar yourself. It’s kind of a hereditary thing.
The best of times.
When I was a kid, summertime meant camping with my family. Specifically, my dad.
My father taught at the local college, so he had most summers off. He and my mom would pack us five kids and our dog into their Buick LeSabre and a pop-up tent trailer, and off we’d go.
Separated from work and the distractions of home—Mom did the cooking and the clean-up!—our dad had more time to spend with us.
We played baseball in the middle of the campground. We learned how to build a fire (with matches!), how to whittle (with a knife!), and how to skip rocks across a river. He helped me pump water from an old-fashioned hand pump, and carry it in a shiny steel bucket back to the campsite without splashing all the water out.
My dad loved Danish pastries for breakfast and doing logic puzzles by lantern light in the evening. He liked to sing songs and make puns and smoke his pipe by the fireside.
Camping with my parents…was. the. BEST.
Nothing can compare with camping.
The problem is that those long-time-ago camping trips set the standard for everything that came afterward. Forever after childhood camping trips, nothing else quite measures up. After all, what can be better than the best?
(People may say that I use superlatives too much. You know—best, worst, happiest, saddest, most. But I’d have to say that I really have no choice when it comes to camping. For in camping, I’ve found the utmost. The best of the best)
The air is better there—it fills my soul as well as my lungs.
After a day spent outside, simple food cooked over an open fire beats the finest, most elaborate cuisine.
Sleep—when I’m camping in the mountains, tucked into my flannel-lined sleeping bag—is more restful for me than any other.
The pattering of rain on the tent, the sigh of the pines, and the rustling of aspen leaves is the best lullaby I’ve ever heard.
The chittering of birds and squirrels in the morning is by far the best wake-up call.
And the smell of a campfire, or the evergreens, or the air in the mountains just after the rain—incomparable.
Already having discovered the best stuff can weigh heavily on your children and their future decisions about where to live, how to spend their time and money, and what they consider the best things in life. Not to mention the person they choose as their life-mate and the way they interact with their own children.
Think carefully about the risks you’re taking with your children.
A few common ways camping can affect a child:
1. They may learn to use camping as a way to escape.
Sometimes being a global citizen is just hard. Sometimes adulting is hard. Rather than losing themselves in commonly accepted forms of escape such as Netflix or video games where they are safe at home on the couch, your grown children may choose to pack their sleeping bags and head for the hills.
Beware. There are dangers out there. Rocks to climb—and fall off of. Rivers to traverse—and fall into. And trails that take them into the wilderness where wild creatures roam. They could get lost, or hurt, or wet, or go for a hike and decide never to return to the career path you chose for them.
2. It might make them occasionally anti-social
Your kids might learn to go camping to get away from other people, just like I did. Not that I don’t love people—because I do, and I’m sure your kids do, too. But I’d rather not hear or see people when I camp. Not them, their pets, their ATV’s, their music, or their generators.
Exception—the good friends or family we are camping with. Some of the best times we’ve had camping are times spent around a campfire with our families and friends.
Your kids might say the same. Are you prepared to accept the consequences of that? You might have to go camping with them and your grandkids someday. Seriously.
3. Camping can be a humbling experience
If you are one of those parents who constantly remind their children how special they are, how they can do or be anything they want, (regardless of how much effort they put in) consider carefully before you allow them to interact with nature. Because nature has a way of showing a person that we are not as all-powerful and mega-important as we like to think we are.
On second thought, it might be the perfect antidote to the hubris that kids tend to develop about the age of 14 or 15. One dose of being alone on a mountainside during a thunderstorm can cure the notion that they are invincible and know oh-so-much-more than their parents.
That might not be a relief for some people, but for me, it is. It might serve your children well, too.
4. Camping can help identify the extraneous.
Camping—the way we choose to do it—reduces life to the nitty-gritty. It jettisons so many of the things we think we have to have here in our first-world society, and reminds us just how little we really need, when it comes right down to it.
When we’re camping, we don’t use a microwave, so we don’t need a generator. It boils down to simple food, clean water, a way to stay warm and dry, good shoes, and an extra pair of socks. And—according to my husband—a trustworthy fishing pole.
I don’t wear makeup when I camp, and I stash my hair under a cap. The pressures of living up to the dictates of society fall away, and I am reduced to the core of myself. It reminds me of who I am, and what is most important.
If you don’t want that level of awareness for your children, whatever you do, don’t take them camping.
P.S. If you choose to take your kids camping like mine did, disregarding all the potential dangers I’ve brought to your attention, I have just one more thing to say to you:
Don’t ever stop.
P.P.S. Thanks, Dad. (And you, too, Mom. Even doing dishes is fun when we’re camping. And that would be your doing.)
Is camping your thing? What’s the best part about it for you?
NOT your thing? What’s your favorite thing you did with your dad as a kid? Tell us about it.
