Camp Should Be Diet-Free! A Camp Staff Training

We 1st posted our Diet regime-Absolutely free Camp Society Staff Education in Could 2019. Then we posted it once again in 2021, for the reason that quite a few summertime camps opened again up after becoming shut in 2020 because of to the pandemic. We hope that all camp team working with youthful youngsters can attempt to keep their camp diet plan-free of charge! Be sure to share this put up and camp employees coaching with administrators and personnel of camps your little ones go to.

Download our current camp workers training lesson below.  

A letter to my daughter’s camp counselor

In the summer of 2018, I sat down to produce a blog site publish late at evening right after I picked up my daughter from two months absent at summer season camp.  I experienced planned to write a put up about quick summertime no-prepare dinner meals. But I was getting trouble getting my text on paper. I opened a new doc and started out creating what I truly required to create. I wrote a letter to my daughter’s camp counselor. After I picked her up previously that working day, my then 12-year-aged daughter had informed me her counselor was on a food plan and “counting her steps” in planning for a post-camp vacation to the Caribbean. My children’s camp is in the mountains. And the days are stuffed with swimming, kayaking, rock climbing, athletics, and managing up and down the hills of camp.

I hated to think that a eating plan interfered with anyone’s head and overall body enduring the joys of camp. Though I was unquestionably not amazed, it manufactured me unhappy that diet regime culture had impacted my 12-12 months-old’s camp encounter. I also know that this is the norm in our culture and undoubtedly the camp or the counselor hadn’t carried out everything deliberately completely wrong. 

My write-up An Open Letter to My Daughter’s Camp Counselor was shared on the web around the summer. It appeared to strike residence for a ton of mother and father.

Summer Camp Tradition

I was a camp particular person. I went to summer season camp for 8 summers as a boy or girl. And then I was a camp counselor for numerous decades in higher school and college. Summer time camp is these types of a particular place. It’s a put eradicated from the “real entire world,” without technological innovation. It is no cost of lots of of the social regulations small children expertise all yr. And camp is a place where by acceptance and kindness are anticipated. Summer time camp focuses on character improvement, dealing with fears, attaining independence, and striving new items. When you are at camp, you are immersed in a new society – Camp Lifestyle. Camp Society contains singing foolish tracks, offering a lot of hugs, encouraging other individuals, care deals, wearing bathing fits for 50 percent the day, crafting letters with pen and paper, and on the lookout up to the counselors. And a focus on weight or diet plans only interferes with the mission of summer time camp.

More mature young adults and younger older people, the counselors, are put in demand of the everyday existence of younger young children. There are no parents there to make a baby have on matching clothing. No one double-checks that they brush their tooth well. Whilst cared for and secure, the kids have a distinctive form of freedom with their younger counselors in cost of day by day existence. The young children look up to their counselors and want to be just like them. They listen to them if they are conversing about dropping body weight or dieting. Camp Tradition wants to be diet program-no cost. 

Camp Workers Instruction

As summer months methods and school semesters appear to a close, camp staff members members all around the region are collecting to get ready for summer camp and the hundreds of 1000’s of small children who will be in their care. The counselors will have extensive workers coaching to find out about the values of camp and the importance of being a very good job product for the campers. The staff members coaching will consist of protection processes, leadership progress, crew constructing, music, eating corridor rules, and schedules. It’s my hope that camp directors will include things like data about the damage of weight loss plans and diet plan discuss in their personnel coaching. Simply because weight loss plans are so commonplace, information and facts about dieting is not incorporated as an essential aspect of schooling people who shell out time with our kids. On the other hand, preserving diet culture out of the actions our little ones are included in definitely fits with the values of quite a few of these routines.

Totally free Camp Staff Education Lesson

We wanted to give a small staff members useful resource that can be integrated in summer time workers teaching in the coming months. Camp Administrators! Obtain our staff teaching lesson, Diet program-Cost-free Camp Lifestyle, for your camp workers training.

Moms and dads, would you share this with your child’s camp? I think the best way to make a change is by means of the voice of parents. We stimulate you to share this with the directors of the camps your youngsters show up at. We’ve performed that and we have emailed American Camp Association to share the training with them.

Camp Directors, if you use this as component of your camp staff instruction or perhaps come to a decision not to, I’d adore to obtain your comments on how this concept can reach camps greater and extra obviously.  Comment under with your feedback and ideas!

Down load our workers schooling lesson for your subsequent camp workers instruction.