Summer Camps Are Not Just Childcare (Guest Post)
a guest essay by Shannon Sanders
The Pomegranate is honored to feature a guest essay today by award-winning author Shannon Sanders.
This past winter, at a birthday party for one of my kids’ friends, I sat chatting with some of the other moms, including “Eve.” Eve is, like me, a mom of three (which isn’t super common in our community); unlike me, she stays home full-time. In a lot of ways, I look up to Eve—her oldest child is older than mine, and over the years I’ve gotten plenty of intel from her about our co-op school, local activities, and other kid-related stuff that gets passed along during, for example, idle minutes at birthday parties. So when the conversation turned to summer camps and I asked what she had scheduled for her older kids, I was surprised by her answer.
“Oh,” she said loosely. “They each have a week of camp lined up and then, I don’t know, we might go to the beach for a while?” Then she made the yikes face.
Here, a quick digression for those who haven’t had the special pleasure of dealing with summer camps in metropolitan centers (I live just outside Washington, DC) in the twenty-first century. Most signups open in January—yes, right after the crush of the holidays—and also close in January. In fact, most of the well-run, moderately affordable camps fill up within minutes. Securing a spot requires someone (USUALLY MOM, but I’m not yelling) to set an alarm, clear their morning, get into position—sometimes as early as 6:30 am, sometimes at the mid-workday hour of 10 am—at the computer, and be blessed by the gods of luck and fast Wi-Fi. Sometimes an ill-timed page refresh costs a kid a spot. It’s a heart-pumping, adrenalized nightmare, and let’s not even talk about how if all goes well payment is then due in full, just as families are recovering from holiday expenses and so forth. My only point is that by February, which this was, my own six-year-old’s summer was sewn up and paid for, and all the camps we’d chosen were waitlist-only.
Eve saw my surprise and added, “I do kind of wish we’d added another week or two for [middle child], because he’ll be climbing walls, but oh well.” She shrugged.
I was briefly shocked. And then, sitting there at the kiddy gymnasium or wherever we were, I had a series of realizations, some of them at least 30 years late: Summer camps are childcare. The summer camps I attended, as a child, were childcare. Eve doesn’t need childcare, so she doesn’t need summer camp. My parents sent me to summer camp because they did need childcare.
You are going to have to take my word for it: I am not an unintelligent or thoughtless person. But yes, this was exactly how I realized that the summer camps I attended as a child—experiences that defined my childhood and that enriched me in ways that were more than enough to justify my attendance—allowed my parents to work uninterrupted when school was out. Yes, even though I had registered my own child for his camps for that exact same reason, it took Eve’s nonchalance to help me put it all together.
And here’s why. Because my Lord did I love summer camp.
The first camp I remember was a semi-fancy day camp held at a private school by the National Cathedral, a storied Washington landmark surrounded by woods. I swam and played heart-racing games of capture-the-flag and got lost in the trees. I developed a little-kid crush on the teenage Clowning instructor and registered repeatedly for the course, learning, in the process, how to spin plates and maneuver devil sticks. I read books by a window that looked directly at the cathedral spires (a place I’d been once on a field trip and that I knew housed tombs with real skeletons in them) and happily indulged fantasies about ghosts. I was sad when the pickup bell sounded at the end of the day.
Then there was dance camp. Was I a dancer? No. I looked like one, skinny with an expressive face, but I couldn’t have cared less about technique and dreaded the performances. Yet the opportunity to spend a week away on a college campus, rooming with girls my age and stretching my independence, was a dream. And I had a great time! Dance took up a lot of the day, but not most of it; there was plenty of time for swimming and socializing, plus a remarkable amount of leisure. This was where I first read V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic, which I found on a dusty bookshelf in a room I wasn’t not supposed to be in and read in three consecutive nights. This was, I tell everyone, the book that made me a writer, the sheer pleasurability of that parent-free reading experience. It was worth having to dance in front of an audience. I didn’t want to leave at the end of the week.
Sleepaway camp up in Massachusetts—here I learned lessons I can’t even list about personhood and social responsibility. Sleeping outside for a month built character in the Calvin & Hobbes way. I had my Discman and my journal and I ended every night writing frantically, my arms and legs singing with good exhaustion. After I aged out, I wound up getting a job there, in the tent for six-year-olds. Who are far too young to be at sleepaway camp. I chaperoned plenty of 2 a.m. bathroom trips and cleaned plenty of peepee, and my lap was perpetually occupied. On my weekly nights off, I flirted with fellow counselors and entangled myself in messy dramas and listened to Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life so many times I memorized all the album transitions. (I hadn’t brought too many CDs with me.) I made $600 or $800 for four weeks, more money than I had ever had to my name. I only stopped working there because I had to go to law school.
You see? At no point during these summers did it cross my mind that my dad, a lawyer, or my mom, a corporate manager, were shipping me offsite for their own purposes, because they weren’t. Year-round, my parents were involved, attentive, thoughtful, and detail-oriented. And what those summertime experiences gave me (and now that I am a woman of a certain age, I can speak on this, clear-eyed!) was more than worth what they spent to send me.
At no point in my life have I felt that my parents didn’t raise me because they both worked full-time. That concept is an insidious, predatory fiction. As a little girl, I watched my mom and her woman friends closely. Every single one had a capital-C Career; some, like my mom, did other work on the side (she taught math classes to adult learners, for example). Outside of the books I read, I had never really heard of a stay-at-home mom until I went to college; even once I learned they really existed, I had a hard time distinguishing them from mothers generally (because all the mothers I knew cooked, cleaned, cared for children, and led the household admin).
And so when my children were born, the fact that we continued to need my income was not some sort of crisis (another propagandistic fiction). But also, I wasn’t spared of any of the hard parts of mothering because I had a job. Every institution you can think of—schools, doctors’ offices, etc.—operate on the assumption that there is a parent at home, or that, if not, someone is reachable at all times of day.
That can add up to a lot of pressure for… parents generally, and here I’ll say specifically mothers. What’s interesting is that, outside job or no, moms get the same external messaging and feel the same compulsions, and that’s on top of what we naturally want to do for our children. Honestly, I think I breastfed for longer per child than I would have if I hadn’t worked outside the home, because it helped me reconnect with them throughout my workdays (even when I was teleworking no more than a few yards away).
But it can create positive opportunities, too. When I was teaching a Tuesday night Zoom class last summer, I instituted a household tradition called “charcuterie Tuesdays.” It was meant to make my evenings a little bit easier—allowing me to feed the kids and then dash off to my class without having to worry about quite so much cleanup. The kids loved it so much that we’re still doing it, a year later. When they’re grown up, I very much doubt they will remember the six-week period when their dad had to put them to bed solo on Tuesdays. But I think they will remember that they eventually learned to lay out their own cheese and crackers and fruit, something they now take great pride in doing.
Likewise, even though the urgent need for workday coverage was what started me researching camp options for my oldest as far back as the previous October, that wasn’t my only or even primary consideration when, in November, I settled on my slate of hoped-for camps. Even once I had filtered down the choices to those that made logistical sense (close enough to home, decent start and end times, ideally a buddy or two who might also attend), only then did the real search begin.
My son loves to draw. He’s a veritable Harold, leaving his increasingly realist masterpieces all over the house. I had heard about a small, nurturing art camp in a scenic little alcove of a progressive suburb near us. The same suburb, actually, where I went to elementary school at my parents’ careful direction. I know these people, this place. This place seems perfect for him. It’s popular, and limits the number of weeks any particular child can attend, but I think he’ll love the time he gets there.
He is obsessed with superheroes, like a lot of kids his age. He has already done a couple years of low-stakes drama camp, and enjoyed it a lot. So this year he’ll go to another camp that helps kids his age put on a play about superheroes. He’s extroverted, but can be a little bit shy; he has told me he wants to try stage crew, and I know they’ll let him.
He has done a couple of years at a classic outdoor camp at a local nature preserve. The counselors give themselves nature names—Daisy, Poplar, Sumac—and they spend the entire day outside in a safe, secluded place saturated with flora and fauna. He’ll spend the rest of his summer there, among people I’ve gotten to know over the past two years (including through frantic email exchanges when I needed help with camp registrations).
He’s going to have a fantastic time. And while he does, I’ll be struggling to squeeze my workday into the hours between drop-off and pick-up. When he comes to the car, I will turn off my professional brain and spend the drive home letting him tell me anything he wants to about what he did while I was earning the money to pay these places. With any luck, he’ll spare me a detail or two! He will be grass-stained and sweaty and grinning; he’ll smell like sunblock. And if I’ve played my cards right, he’ll be looking ahead to the next day of play, wondering why I’ve come to interrupt his incredible summer.
Shannon Sanders is the author of the forthcoming novel THE GREAT WHEREVER (Holt, summer 2026) and the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was named a Publishers Weekly and Debutiful Best Book of 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. She lives in Silver Spring, MD with her husband and three sons. Find her at Shanders.bsky.social, i.exaggerate on Instagram, and via her parenting/publishing newsletter.
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Shannon, you have captured and shared beautifully the joy of summer camp. I was lucky enough to go to camp in VT for 8 weeks during middle school. My kids went to camp in CO where my husband had spent many happy years, even though our daughter was only 8 and we put all three of them on a plane by themselves. (Pre 9/11) Two DC area camps you might want to know about are Calleva and, my favorite, Valley Mill camp. Thank you for your touching and warm post.