The Importance of a Device-free Summer

Guest blog for MCE by Matt Pines, co-owner/director of Maine Teen Camp & PhD Candidate studying the impacts of technology, nature, and peers on youth wellbeing

As Maine camp directors, staff, and (very soon) campers prepare to enter the “summer bubble” and tune out the world for a couple of blessed months, it is impossible not to notice that the level of noise about, and caused by, technology in everyone’s lives is reaching a crescendo. The cellphones-in-schools debate is hot, the role of AI in everything from running the government to running your fridge is hotter still, and the role of social media stirring up everything somehow manages to only ever get larger every single day.

So it is no surprise that camps, too, must answer near constant questions about the presence and role of technology during the summer.

This is not a new debate. In fact, I wrote about it for Camping Magazine way back in 2019, rebutting a prediction that e-Sports would be played in every summer camp in the US by 2024. At that time, I mostly focused on the detrimental impact of smartphones, and how important it was that summer camps continue to resist any push to allow phones in camp. It’s fair to say that a few things have happened since 2019. The COVID pandemic saw an unprecedented explosion in screen time and device usage for kids and teens (and adults) of all ages, an increase which has failed to fall back to pre-pandemic levels. Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book “The Anxious Generation” drew attention to the problems for young people’s mental, social, and physical health being caused by device usage in 2024. ChatGPT popped into our collective consciousness seemingly overnight in November 2022.

Despite all this, summer camps have largely remained unchanged, and the most obvious challenges posed by phones are the same as outlined in 2019. I’ll quickly outline 3 of those.

First and most important: camp is about learning how to make and keep connections. This has always been true, but is more so in 2025 with a generation of kids whose social skill development has been stunted. Camps role model, coach, and facilitate endless opportunities to practice and improve friend-making skills. Even more importantly, camp is the best place in the world to learn conflict resolution and friendship repair – essential skills for maintaining friendships that are entirely absent from online spaces. Unfortunately, despite the promises made by Mark Zuckerberg et al., mountains of research now tell us that device time, especially time spent on social media, is largely corrosive to connection. We know from the research that kids who have good real-life social connections can use online spaces in moderation (up to 1 hour per day) to strengthen those connections. However, kids who look to online spaces to fulfill social needs see their social skills atrophy and their real-world connections drop away. A self-reinforcing cycle is established - kids who socialize well offline build robust interpersonal skills that protect them from the worst impacts of online spaces. Kids who seek to fill their social needs primarily online become more vulnerable to the possible harms of social media and the internet, further eroding their real-world connections, giving them more motivation to spend more time online. For this reason alone, it is essential that camps remain phone-free.

Second is the fragmentation of attention, which is one aspect of the miscalibration of the dopamine receptors in the brain. Particularly for boys, the modern era of video games—both console and mobile—are massively addictive*, and for all genders, the infinite scroll of TikTok (and its clones, like YouTube Shorts) presents a similar attention-capturing, frantically rewarding trap that young people (and most adults) find irresistible. These screen-based activities do two things. They train the brain that focus/attention only needs to be maintained in short bursts, and they activate the brains’ reward center (the dopamine response) on an accelerated scale - aka instant gratification. (This is a very simplified account of a very complex process.) *Gaming addiction should be thought of as a behavioral addiction, similar to gambling, and not a chemical addiction as with nicotine or alcohol.

This may be problematic in and of itself (in fact it is, but put that aside). What’s especially bad about this dopamine miscalibration in the context of camp is that it prevents kids from being able to access and appreciate incredibly beneficial activities that require sustained attention or delayed gratification. Some physical activities – hitting a perfect first serve or controlling breath in archery – require a quiet concentration and deliver immense satisfaction on a time scale measured in days, weeks, even months. Some more creative pursuits require an even harder mental feat – daydreaming, mind wandering, even “gasp” boredom. None of that is compatible with constant text messages, Snapchat notifications, or an influencer’s latest post.

Which brings us to the third point. Social comparison. Kids should not be able to compare their looks, their shoes, and their morning routines 24/7. Instagram and other social media platforms are profoundly unhealthy, and this is only one of the major reasons why. Simply – no one can ever feel like they compare favorably to a tightly planned, highly edited version of someone else’s “reality.” Compare that to one of the simplest, most profoundly significant aspects of the summer camp environment; the egalitarian nature of cabin life. Whether a camper’s grandparents founded a multinational corporation, or a camper attends camp on a full campership, they share cabin chores, learn cabin chants together, wait in line for showers, and race each other to be first in line for lunch at camp. There is no comparison based on some edited version of themselves. Camp is the literal definition of “no filters.” Camp is the essence of authenticity; there is no room for cynicism or being cool. Instead, campers can simply be themselves; this brings out the best in campers as a result. The presence of even a single phone would change all that in a heartbeat.

Finally, there is another aspect of the camp experience that I did not fully appreciate in 2019, but is now abundantly clear. Summer camp helps to break the anxiety loop that so many of us find ourselves caught in as parents.

A legendary figure in Maine camping, Jack Erler, a longtime advisor for Maine Summer Camps, likes to say that “camp gives kids a place apart from their parents, to learn to be with their peers.” This is more true in 2025 than it was when I first heard it sometime around 2001. But the corollary even more so – camp also gives parents a time to learn to be apart from their kids. Parental tracking of kids, checking in with kids during the school day, near constant intervention in any problem large or small, and making all decisions for their child sends kids the message that the world is a terribly unsafe place. With some exceptions, that is simply not true. Kids are safer now than at almost any time in history (except online).

I recently heard someone describe anxiety as “an overestimation of the problem, and an underestimation of your ability to solve it.” When we constantly help our kids avoid or escape discomfort, when we solve all their problems for them, when we don’t allow them the autonomy to travel through the world without our tracking every move, we are sending them a clear message – “you are right, the problem is too big, and you are not capable.”

Camp gives parents a chance to break the cycle. It might be a bit hard at first but use the opportunity of camp to learn how to offer your child the gift of agency. There are many caring, highly certified, trained adults at the camp looking after your kid, the staff at the camp you have so carefully chosen will be there for your camper this summer. And please don’t do the following …

• Don’t send a dummy phone to turn into the office.
• Don’t send AirTags sewn into the hem of their clothes.
• Don’t sign up for push notifications every time a new photo of your kid gets uploaded.
• DON’T call your camp director to ask why your kid wasn’t smiling in the background of a photo the camp posts. (Ask me how I know about this …)

Finally, here in Maine we’re getting some very good scientific evidence that summer camp is really good for kids. This summer 10 camps (mostly in Maine) will be collecting data to continue a study started in 2024 that is hoping to understand what exactly about the camp experience is so beneficial. The data from 2024 showed that campers across the board improved in a range of outcomes, from cognitive efficacy to socialization skills. Which is great, we all believe camp is really good for kids, it’s nice to get the scientific community to agree. But what’s more important is the why. What is it about camp that is so beneficial? We suspect that one of the main reasons is the device-free nature of camp. It’s unlikely that it is just the absence of phones. A more plausible explanation is that without phones, campers are able to access the full benefit of available peers, lots of activity, lots of nature, plenty of sleep, and device-free adult role models. But phones would almost certainly block at least some, if not all, of those benefits. In many ways, camp is the last refuge of the phone-free childhood. Let’s allow these “digital natives” to visit the land of their parents’ and grandparents’ childhoods.

Matt Pines and his wife Monique Rafuse have been the owner/directors of Maine Teen Camp for the past 19 years. In addition to running camp, Monique is Clinical Therapist who works primarily with adolescents, and Matt is a PhD Candidate studying the impacts of technology, nature, and peers on youth wellbeing, as well as an advocate for phone-free schools and play-based childhoods.