Kiwi Camps

My Instagram feed is currently filled with pictures of our US friends going off to summer camp - many for the first time thanks to covid. Kids are smiling into the cameras wearing their camp t-shirts and sitting on their painted camp trunks, and it brings back so many memories for me. I absolutely loved going to summer camp each year and half-jokingly talked about how I couldn’t wait for the kids to be 5 and 7 so i could finally ship them off each summer.

Then we moved to New Zealand, where summer camps aren’t a thing.

Camping is a thing, but it is usually done with family and friends. There are a few “farm stays,” some Christian camps, and a handful of activity-specific options (think horseback riding or surfing) but even these are five nights, max. The vast majority of these options aren’t available to kids under 8. I haven’t found anything like the summer camps in the US, complete with multi-week stays and a huge variety of indoor and outdoor activities that require packing a huge camp trunk with everything you need for a month.

However, there are “school camps” and, in fact, it appears to be an expected part of the curriculum. Starting in Year 3 (approximately 2nd grade) my kids do an overnight stay at school. This year, my Year 4 son is spending a week at a local youth camp with his entire grade, teachers, and a handful of parents who volunteered to help chaperone. The experiences grow from there. For my daughter, she’ll eventually end up spending a month away in the Bay of Plenty in Year 10.

I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around the different approaches to “camp” since I loved American summer camp so much. I couldn’t wait to get away each summer - and I’m sure my parents couldn’t wait either. I’m excited that my kids get to experience something similar with their school friends, though to be fair, part of the appeal of summer camp was meeting new people from all over the country and getting to try on different personas with them.

Part of me thinks that it might be time to enrol the kids in US summer camp during the July school holidays so they can partake in this very American tradition. I know another expat family that moved with older kids who regularly took an extra week off of school in July to continue their tradition of US summer camp. I wonder if my kids would be interested in the same?

Camp is one of those things that’s just a little different here. Since much of the country shuts down in the summer, parents often aren’t pressure to work nearly as much and don’t need the built in child care. Plus, this is a good time to take a big trip as a family. Summer camps just don’t have the same appeal and market in New Zealand as in the US. It’s an unexpected disappointment - something I always assumed would be an option… until it wasn’t.

Hopefully my camper comes back at the end of the week with great memories and most of the clothing items he took with him. It would be a bonus if he actually wore clean underwear every day and brushed his teeth!

Post Camp Update:

He had an amazing time and would’ve happily stayed longer. The boys stayed in cabins with 4-6 kids per cabin… but no adults. That was a bit of a surprise for me as I assumed there would be one of the parent volunteers around to make sure they fell asleep at a reasonable hour. (Shocker - they didn’t.) Other highlights included the food, mainly because he was able to get seconds on dessert every night and thought that was the best thing ever. He managed to bring back everything he packed and nothing he didn’t. Overall, it was a successful adventure!