Brew Review // Morning Brew // Update

EDITOR’S NOTE

Attention campers: Lunch may be canceled due to lack of hustle, but this newsletter isn’t. As we enter the time of year when suddenly millions of kids (and some adults) are looking for stuff to do, we’re bringing you a special edition all about the business of summer camps. Read on to learn how they evolved from military-like drill camps to a billion-dollar industry that serves kids gourmet meals in between ceramics courses. Welcome to Camp Morning Brew.

SEND THE KIDS AWAY

The big business of bunks and bugs

Unsplash

The duffel bags and shower caddies are being packed. Whether it’s a two-week day camp in a city park or an exclusive sleepaway tucked away in the Maine wilderness that charges $17,000 a kid, the 20,000+ camps scattered around the US are a huge business.

The state of summer camp: The US youth camp industry was worth an estimated $4.6 billion last year, according to an analysis from IBISWorld. As childcare costs skyrocket, so too have prices at summer camps, which have roared back to life after the industry took a $16 billion pandemic blow in 2020, according to the American Camp Association (ACA).

Inflation and rising labor costs have pushed up camp costs for families around the country:

Day camps in 2024 cost an average of $87 per day, while overnight camps clock in at about $173 per day, according to the most recent data from the ACA.
At the start of 2025, 25% of parents said they expected to spend over $2,000 on summer camps, according to a NerdWallet survey.
And in expensive cities like NYC, that number can easily shoot past $10,000, with popular summer camps filling up 10 months before the start date.

The spending doesn’t stop there. Wealthy parents are inventing a whole new industry of camp amenities by shelling out for specialized laundry services to get the bug-spray smell out of everything, $125/hour packing helpers, and personal shoppers offering “new camper appointments” at children’s boutiques to get kids totally outfitted.—MM

Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh. We need more sushi, for the grotto

Don’t expect today’s luxury campers to get by on just gorp and Eggs Erroneous. They’re eating farm-to-table, scratch-made meals. Sometimes, they even help grow the produce in on-site, organic gardens.

But if omelets, daily salad bars, and fresh-baked cakes aren’t enough, there’s always visiting day, which many parents use to sneak in giant candy balls, sushi platters, and steak. Some families even bring their housekeepers, presumably to clean up all of the empty soy sauce packets.

There are benefits for the counselors, too. In a bid to set their teenage staffers on the right career course, some summer camps offer job-hunting lessons, internship-style programs, and connections to successful camp alumni.—BC

GATHER ’ROUND THE FIRE

The history of summer camps in the US

The Gunnery Camp, 1861. Public Domain

Sending kids away for weeks at a time each summer to commune with nature is as American as patriotism, capitalism, and anxiety. So, unsurprisingly, the history of summer camp twines around all three.

Eight score and five years ago…

In the summer of 1861, just after the Civil War began, the educator Frederick Gunn unofficially brought forth the first summer camp in conjunction with his boarding school in Connecticut. He made around 40 kids hike 42 miles to the Long Island Sound, where they woke up to a bugle call, caught their own fish, and performed military drills.

The first independent summer camp came along five years later, when the North Mountain School of Physical Culture charged the parents of “weakly boys” $200 to spend four months in the woods of Northeastern Pennsylvania to toughen them up.

By the end of World War I, summer camps were well established throughout the US, with options for very poor children to gain the benefits of nature and for very rich children to be whipped into shape outside of their summer hotels.

Postwar changed everything

After World War II, parents increasingly worried that their children had been toughened enough by life—food rations, air raid drills, family members dying in service—and that summer camp could become a place for them to chill out instead. This is how we got to the handicrafts-and-s’mores era.

Specialized camps centered around a particular interest for shorter amounts of time emerged in the last decades of the 20th century:

Perhaps the most famous is Space Camp, launched by the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL, in 1982.
The concept caught on more broadly, with computer camps, basketball camps, dance camps, and theater camps proliferating through the ’90s.

What has changed: It’s hard to find long-term residential summer camps for kids these days, as the market shifts to accommodate the hectic schedules of modern kids and their parents.—HVL

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