The Dangerous Book for Boys has sat atop bestseller lists all summer. It is essentially nostalgia among adults for their youthes spent scraping knees and throwing rocks at each other. Good times…
The book is flying off shelves for the same reason the Patriot Act passed: Fear. Parents today worry that their kids aren’t getting out enough, aren’t enjoying nature, are just zoning out all summer, wiimote in hand. But while teen’s lives have gone hyper-digital, most are not spending their summers in front of screens. Many specialty camps are allowing youth to discover like-minded peers offline.
We attribute this trend to social media, which has allowed youth to form communities of shared interest online through niche SNS and media channels. While they may not be doing forced marches to Lake Winnesaka or peeing in the woods, the camps are character building in ways that are much more meaningful today. Intern Marc Matthews surveys some of the new summer options for today’s tweens and teens…
Ok, so some kids are still on the computer all summer. Technical camps, breeding grounds for the next Bill Gates, have caught on like Facebook. Cybercamps teaches kids the ins and outs of technology including video game design, robotics, web site design and digital photography. For future developers, iD Camp and Emagination Computer Camps offer classes in flash and 3-D animation. The recent “Circuits of Cool/Digital Playground” study from MTV, Nickelodeon, and Microsoft shows the average teen just wants to have awesome technology, but couldn’t care less how it works. It won’t be long before these campers are making money off their peers hand over fist.
Many don’t just want to be rich or smart, they want to be famous: 31% of teens in a Washington Post poll are convinced they will be famous someday. American Idol gets more campy with Idol Camp, ten days “magic-filled” days of singing and dancing taught former contestants. Parents are paying $2,900 for the program, just a fraction of the $1.2 billion a year spent this year on specialty camps.
Some other niche camps that caught my eye:
- Aviation Career Education (ACE) gives African American kids opportunities to learn how to be pilots, a field that is predominately white.
- “Hop on the Hogwarts Express” camp put on by the New Canaan school district is inspiring kids to learn on their summer break by recreating the magical world of Hogwarts
- Camp Wonder is exclusively for kids with severe skin diseases. Instead of getting stared at, they can participate in an environment where, as their motto states, “nobody will look at you twice.”
Kids today have it pretty sweet–they could just be watching Salute Your Shorts, Bug Juice or Hey Dude! at home like I did. -MM
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1 » China’s Internet Addiction Camps » Next Great Thing // Aug 10, 2007 at 8:57 am
[...] to a topic we raised the other day: parent’s fears that kids are spending too much time indoors and online. We talked about the [...]
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