Do you look back on your camping days and remember how much fun you had? Or how happy you were?
We all do it, right. And, so it will be unfair to them if our care for our kids deprives them of the same feeling.
Well, camping is beneficial for us regardless of our age and for the youth today, it is of more benefits. In the era of smartphones, let your kid out in nature and have him experience things he/she has never done before.
Let’s brief out Benefits Of Camping For Youth:
- Personality Development
- Promote person to person conversation
- Develop teamwork
- Building Self-Esteem
- Promotes independence
- Physical Development
- Develop strength
- Learning Survival skills
- Promotes healthy lifestyle
- Interest Development
- Help find passion and talent
- Strengthen social relationship
- Connecting with nature
- Other Benefits
- Disconnecting from Technology
- Time to relax and rewind
- Spending time with families
- Learn to overcome failure
If you are still not sure if camping is the next right thing for your kid’s development, let us convince you otherwise.
What Is Camping & What Are Its Types?
In case you were wondering, camping is an outdoor and recreational activity in which you stay out overnight away from your home, it can be as near as your garden or as far as some mountain, in a shelter you make, usually tents, or hammocks.
So, because of that, there are two types of camping, tent camping, and hammock camping.
As simple as the name goes, in a tent camping, you stay in a tent, and in hammock camping, you stay in a hammock.
If you want to know more about tent and hammock camping, you can check out here.
For your kid, we advise you to go tent camping because hammocks it not the best for first times and definitely not for first-timer kids.
Coming To Benefits Of Camping For Youth
So, now we know what is camping and what are the types. Now you must be wondering that you are not convinced you want camping for your kids based on what you have just read. Then let us tell you that camping is advantageous for your kid on not just one but three fronts, personality development, physical development, and interest development.
Personality development
Let me ask you a question, is your kid addicted to avoiding real-life conversations and would rather stick to one on social media?
You must be surprised that it the situation, not just for you kid, or the kids of your country, but for kids throughout the world. And in this situation, camping can help develop your kid’s personality:
1. Promote person to person conversation:
Your kid may get away from talking to people at home but if you go for camps, this isn’t viable anymore. They have to talk with the ones around them with who you send them to camp. Also, in camps, activities like cooking and setting up the camp ensure that they spend more time having fun with each other instead of sticking to their smartphone or laptop.
2. Develop teamwork:
Camping involves so many activities like setting up a tent, cooking food, lighting a campfire, and going on hikes. But not one of them can be done on your own. Your kid will have to get involved with others and have some degree of teamwork to pull them off.
Surely it is easy to toast your bread by yourself, but you cannot cook your food at camp over a fire by yourself. You can switch on your AC and enjoy a comfortable night’s sleep, but you will surely fail miserably if you try to pitch your tent single-handedly.
Considering the importance of teamwork to survive in this world, it is better if your kid learns how to be a team player from the younger days itself.
3. Building Self-Esteem:
Everyone makes decisions in life based on how they see themselves. And if your kids have gone on a camp in their younger days, the activities like fishing, hiking, and sports activities can build their self-esteem.
When your kid decides to do something incorporating other people’s ideas, it can develop self-esteem because they are taking their own decisions after all.
4. Promotes independence:
Kids most of the time, get scared at the thought of sleeping without their mom or dad and this turns into a habit. What this means is that the kids get more and more dependent as they grow up.
But if you send your kid to camp, he/she will be sleeping alone in the company of friends, doing stuff alone, and get more and more independent.
So, the next time your kids return back from camp, don’t be surprised to see a more mature and stronger personality.
Physical Development
Camping does develop your kid mentally, but the more visible difference a camp makes is in the physical aspect of things.
1. Develop strength:
Your kid shouldn’t be weak that other kids can pick on him/her. So, to develop strength in your kid, physical exercise has to be given and this is done well and truly in a camp.
Activities like hiking, sports, and setting up of camp can make your kid strong. In this modern world, kids restricted to smartphones do not get enough opportunity in day to day life to build their strength. So, you should send your kids camping with their peers.
2. Learning Survival skills:
In this era of smartphones, it is unfortunate that most kids are lacking when it comes to survival skills because these are the things that can’t be learned from books.
Setting up a camp is a good skill one should have. Also, cooking in raw fire and fishing are also skills that can come in handy. These skills were considered a necessity in the earlier days, but nowadays they are not considered important.
Never the less, it is always good to know these skills. Additionally, knowing how to set up a campfire or knowing navigation skills for hiking are very good skills to know and your kids can surely be popular among their friends because of camping.
3. Promotes healthy lifestyle:
Kids in their usual lifestyle have more affinity towards junk food. Though tasty, junk food isn’t good for health and can weaken their stomach. Even the food doesn’t get the chance to digest as their body is almost in a state of rest and no physical exercise.
Camps encourage healthy eating and physical tasks and what is even better is that it is done in a fun way. Your kids will eat a healthy diet which includes leafy vegetables and fresh meat, and eating with friends can make it fun. Also, running around and playing, working hard can improve your kid’s lifestyle in a way you couldn’t have imagined.
Interest Development
All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.
This play means physical games and not video games. All kids have been getting into a dull lifestyle because of technology and this has turned their attention away from the environment as well. Camps are an effective way to get out of such a lifestyle for a while.
1. Help find passion and talent:
There is no way to know what your kid is good at or what he/she is passionate about. For that, your kid needs to spend some time in nature by themselves and realize what he/she is good at.
If one pursues a career in what they are interested in, it will lead to a satisfactory life, or else they just go with the motion. So, getting an idea of what your kid is good at in camps is a good idea.
The things that can get the most inept of your kids are fishing, botany, engineering, environment, astronomy, etc.
2. Strengthen social relationship:
You want your kids to be able to gel with others and that he/she shows interest in others life. Camping is an easy way to ensure your kid has these qualities. Camping promotes a healthy environment for friendships and talk to each other about their lives and show interest in other people’s lives.
3. Connecting with nature:
As the world gets more industrialized, deforestation has come up as a very important issue. With that the case, having your kid connect with nature and show interest in the environment is a very good thing that needs to be promoted more and more.
Nature has given us so many appreciable gifts, from the air we breathe to the food we eat, practically everything can be connected back to the environment. So, you should send your kids on a camping trip and let them see for themselves and get encouraged more to go on such trips.
Other Benefits:
1. Disconnecting from Technology:
As we all know, youth these days spend most of their time at home with their laptops, television, smartphone, or tablets. Almost seven to eight hours of their day is spent in front of a screen. If you do the math that is a lot considering an entire year.
Camping is a great way to give a rest to the eyes and body from screens and admire the natural beauty for once. This is why it is good to set your kid to camp at least once a year.
2. Time to relax and rewind:
Just like adults go camping to get away from jobs and day to day life’s stress, kids have the stress of their own. They go to schools and have the pressure of performing well. Having a camp in between the kid can relax for a while, not worry about other things and enjoy the moment.
3. Spending time with families:
It is often seen that although kids stay home most of the time, real conversations do not happen s often as the parent would like.
So, going camping as a family with your kid means that you get to spend a good quality of family time and develop the kid’s bond with family.
4. Learn to overcome failure:
Most of the stuff your kid will do camping will be a hit and trial. If they fail to light the campfire once, they will try again. This gives a key lesson to your kid that problems and failures will always be there but what’s important is how you overcome the failure and solve the problem.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Are You Convinced?
To sum it all up sending kids to camp ensure that they come out of their comfort zone, away from technology, and interact with mother nature.
Camps develop kids mentally and physically. They find goals for the future and all of that while having fun and making friends.
So, we hope you are convinced and that your kid is going to the next camp.
Do share your kid’s adventurous stories in camp with us, and say what benefits he/she gained through camping through the comment section below.
Happy camping!
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