Should my child do holiday camps, and should they study over the summer?

For most children, the idea of the summer holidays is the stuff that dreams are made of. Endless hours running around in the park with their friends, making daisy chains while immersed in fields of long green grass, and riding their bikes up and down their neighbourhood as the sun goes down.

But as a parent, even though you’ll want your child to enjoy the summer months, you’ll probably also be wondering how they can make the most out of this time.

A common way for your child to spend summer is to enrol in a holiday camp or to engage in extra study. We know that these may sound like productive ideas on the surface, but convincing your child of this may be another story!

So, we thought we’d provide some information on both, so you can feel confident and assured that you are making the right decision for your child.

What do you need to know about sending your child to a holiday camp?

Choosing the right type of camp is important. Depending on what your child’s interests or hobbies are, you may be stuck as to what type of camp is the best fit for them, and in the best interests of their education, too. Studies tell us that there is a lot of evidence showing that specialised, sleepaway camps for certain groups of children provide the best results. And choosing a specialised camp like this may help you consider what sorts of benefits your child will be gaining during their summer stay there.

Camp can help your child understand the value of belonging. Children in this age range are often at a rather tentative age, where they are still trying to figure out how to interact with others. Studies that have followed children who have taken part in a camp with children who have similar issues to them (like suffering from cancer, for example) and the results indicated a lot of positive psychosocial outcomes. For example, a decline in loneliness, and an increase in self-esteem and self-acceptance.

Camp is great for helping your child socialise. One of the main benefits that have surfaced from children attending camp is that they learn how to properly socialise through extracurricular activities and gain more confidence in this area. Camp gives a child another significant opportunity to make friends and form connections with peers outside of the school environment.

It might be an opportunity to introduce your child to financial issues. Whatever way you look at it, sending your child to a summer camp can be very expensive. However, this may be a good opportunity for you to open your child up to the topic of money and finance, and give them a head start to understanding that having the opportunity to do fun things means working hard to be able to afford them.

Now we’ve talked about the benefits of sending your child to camp. Let's discuss the topic of encouraging your child to study over the summer. Many parents are conflicted on this, and it can be a tricky instruction to break to a child who is looking forward to a summer of no responsibilities!

So, should your child study over the summer?

Some say that children need to brush up on their skills over the summer break. In the 1980s and 1990s, some used to refer to the term “summer learning loss” which referred to the negative effect that the summer break had upon the academic skills a child had attained during school hours. However, it’s worth mentioning that the evidence of this is relatively small.

Summer has been considered to be a good time for a child to increase their skills. If you believe your child has been falling behind in some area or another, or you have a certain desire to advance them ahead in their learning, summer is certainly a good opportunity to do this.

Ultimately, it’s up to you how you wish your child to spend their summer. Although summer is a great time for increasing reading prep or maths advancement, you may actually decide that this time is better suited to other skill development. For example, learning to build a fire, spending time with peers, or camping in the woods. Although these aren’t academic skills your child would learn in school, they are still very valuable in other ways. You simply have to weigh up not only what is best for your child, but also how they feel about their summer, and what they would like to achieve out of this time.

Should my child do holiday camps, and should they study over summer?