The Toxic Combination Making Kids’ Summer Camps Impossible to Book and Too Expensive

This is Emotional Investment, Joel Anderson’s column about money and how we think about it. To suggest a subject or get in touch, email emotional.investment@slate.com.

It was mid-March, and Jamie Aderski was already running out of options. She was looking for an affordable summer camp with availability for her 8-year-old son in their central New Jersey town—and she wasn’t having much luck.

Aderski’s son is much more into arts than athletics. He had no interest in spending additional time at the local YMCA. A camp operated by their neighborhood school was booked up. And the other options required at least $1,000 to reserve a spot, a considerable sum for the middle-class family of four.

“This is after the holiday, and I don’t have that kind of money,” Aderski said. “I was really frustrated, and I was thinking about it all day.”

Aderski has done lots of improv and comedy acting over the years, so she had an idea of what to do with her frustration. She turned to TikTok, where her account has nearly 8,700 followers. “It really was me on my computer, tearing my hair out, and then saying, like, ‘Forget it! I’ve got to just create something—I can’t do it anymore,’ ” she said.

Aderski came up with a nearly three-minute post in which she toggles between acting as a detached school administrator and a flustered parent who is only beginning to realize she doesn’t have any summer care plans for her children, after learning that even an $8,000 science camp is sold out. Aderski titled the post “Send your kids to camp or quit or job?”

That TikTok struck a nerve with dozens of her followers, who filled her comment section with similar gripes.

“The summer camp I used to work at usually sold out immediately and was $300/week,” said one.

“Even camps don’t last the whole time, so there’s still between a week to 3 weeks you still need childcare,” wrote another.

And this one stood out: “Couple pays $2,700 a month for daycare they are not even wealthy.” I can relate—my wife and I spend a similar amount on preschool for our 2-year-old son here in the Bay Area. And it might sound hard to believe, but that seems like a reasonable price compared with our other options.

Aderski’s post caught the attention of a producer at CBS News. She sat down for an interview as part of a story about the soaring cost of summer camp, which aired May 1. When I spoke to Aderski last week, it had been about two months since her brush with virality and national fame. I figured she must have heard from someone—a TikTok follower, a CBS News viewer, a camp leader looking for some good publicity—who gave her a solid lead on good summer activities.

She’s had no such luck.

“He’ll be at home,” Aderski said of her son. “I’m already freaking out because I think he’s going to be bored and there’s not a whole lot I can do.”

If even Aderski—a white, married middle-class woman who has the flexibility to work remotely—can’t catch a break, imagine what so many other less secure parents are going through.

Summers have changed over the past few decades. When I was growing up in suburban Houston, my parents tried a number of things to keep me busy during the summer, from basketball camps to a few weeks at the YMCA to a track-and-field club that sent me on my first airplane trip at the age of 10. But mostly, especially once I entered middle school, I was left at home during the day to play Nintendo, snack on TV dinners, and bike around my neighborhood, looking for something to do with my friends.

The thought of going to a science camp, or spending a couple of weeks in the Texas wilderness with other kids my age, sounded boring at best and god-awful at worst. And my parents didn’t push it, whether because of their own financial constraints or because of their unwillingness to fight me over it—probably both. All things considered, I remember those summers pretty fondly.

But that’s no longer the norm. One theory of the case around summer-camp stress posits that today parents are acutely aware of the competition for academically rigorous schools, and summer camps and activities are considered a mandatory complement to the academic school year—or a way to get a leg up. And that means that the costs keep skyrocketing.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace, a mother of three teenagers and the author of Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It, said this parenting shift is a result of the increasingly uncertain economic future facing today’s children, a situation that has also triggered additional parental anxiety.

“Parents today get their moral worth by how they act on the sidelines, how engaged they are as parents,” said Wallace, pointing to a survey of 6,000 parents she conducted in early 2020 with assistance from a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The survey found that 73 percent of parents somewhat or strongly felt that “parents in my community generally agree that getting into a selective college is one of the most important ingredients for later-life happiness.”

That has fueled the summer-camp arms race.

“In the ’70s and ’80s, parents could be relatively assured—even if their kids were riding bikes all summer—that most likely their kids would be able to replicate their own childhood,” Wallace said. “But millennials are the first generation who are not doing as well as their parents, and we’re seeing the steep inequity ushered in over the last few decades.” As a result, according to Wallace, “we have professionalized childhood in the worst possible way.”

The thing is, parents—and children—don’t like this. Eighty-seven percent of parents who responded to Wallace’s survey somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement “I wish today’s childhood was less stressful for my kids.”

I’m not entirely sold that this stress is fundamentally new, though. Having been raised by parents who came of age in the Jim Crow South, I was already constantly reminded that mediocrity was unacceptable. My parents always warned me that anything less than high achievement would doom me to a life of precarity in a country that was fundamentally hostile to Black people. “You’ve got to be twice as good to go half as far,” my parents said repeatedly throughout my childhood. In that way, the easy, breezy summers of my youth were a mere breather from a race I was always running, in which I was already disadvantaged.

I take Wallace’s findings and advice seriously. Which is why I’ll heed her guidance to find activities or camps that align with my child’s particular interests. “Get a Ph.D. in your kid,” she said. “What is it that makes them light up?”

The problem is that it still might be hard, because the camping industry hasn’t fully recovered from the summer of 2020 and the scariest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Essentially, what we’re seeing today is, demand for camp has far outstretched supply,” said Tom Rosenberg, president and CEO of the American Camp Association. Camp capacity is around 30 million kids, but there are more than 55 million kids across the country. Which is why Rosenberg is “advocating to whomever will listen that we need to find ways to increase the capacity of camp out there for all of our kids.”

Here’s the irony: Rosenberg thinks that one way to increase camp capacity is to get more older teenagers to staff those camps—and that kind of experience can look good on a college application. “When I think of taking an internship vs. being a camp counselor, I would do the camp counselor job all day long. You’re going to get a tremendous amount of responsibility,” he said.

If you’re lucky enough to find a summer camp with open spots, remember that cost isn’t necessarily reflective of quality. Several parents and people who work in the camp industry told me about the opportunists who have seized on the insecurity of parents and charge them a premium.

“Sometimes when I charge lower prices, I have to do more convincing,” said Issa Braithwaite, who runs a summer football program in Vancouver, British Columbia, and previously worked at camps in Cleveland and his native Washington. “These other camps and sports teams are trying to sell parents on the professionalization of their kid. But not only are the camps more expensive, the quality of instruction is not better.”

The basketball trainers who pledge to turn 5-foot-6 teens into major college prospects, the tutors who guarantee academic improvement good enough for admission into elite colleges, the gymnastics classes that promise the type of rigorous training that Olympic-caliber athletes go through? They’re selling dreams, basically.

In a more recent TikTok, Aderski posted about finally finding “an affordable summer option.” She’d stumbled across an advertisement for a Chick-fil-A summer camp that runs from July 22–24 in West Hammond, Louisiana. The camp’s activities include learning how to take a food order, touring the kitchen, boxing up an order of chicken nuggets, and making an Icedream cone. The cost? Only $35.

“Essentially, you’re paying them to use your child for free labor,” Aderski says in the video.

Aderski told me that, no, she would not be sending her son to Louisiana to make nuggets. But in the comments under the ad, many people were taking it very seriously. Said one commenter: “This is a big bargain.”

And in a sign of the times, within a day, the camp was already booked up.