The week before camp is when your son builds the skills he’ll lean on all summer, and after.
Your son will not have a phone, tablet, or screen for his time at WEHC. That’s intentional. But the shift can be hard if the first taste of it is the moment he gets on the bus or steps out of your car.
The week before camp is when you can do something about that.
Many boys his age spend much of the day with a device within reach. Their brains are used to quick input, fast feedback, and a constant pull toward something to look at. Camp is the opposite. Long stretches with other boys, real conversations, real boredom that turns into real play.
That contrast is part of what makes camp work. It is also why the first 48 hours can feel rocky for a boy who arrives unprepared.
Here are four moves that help.
1. Start tapering a week out. Don’t go cold turkey on departure day. Cut screen time gradually in the days leading up. Less today than yesterday. Less tomorrow than today. The goal is for the first big screen-free stretch to happen before he is also processing a new bunk, new boys, and new routines.
2. Replace, don’t just remove. Take a screen away and something has to fill the space. Card games. A book. Time outside. Helping pack his trunk. Talking with you over dinner. Every minute spent with people instead of a screen is practice for the cabin he’s about to walk into.
3. Use the ride to Maine. The drive up, or the bus ride from Boston, is a transition zone. Treat it as part of camp. Phone away. Talk. Look out the window. Let him be a little bored. By the time he walks onto our property, his system has already started shifting.
4. Name what’s coming. Tell him, plainly, that he won’t have his device at camp. Tell him it might feel strange on day one. Tell him that most boys here go through the same adjustment, and most come out the other side of it within a few days. Knowing it is coming makes it easier to ride through.
The first week of camp is a lot. New cabin, new schedule, new faces, new food, new toilet paper, new everything. If we can take “no screens” off the list of things he is experiencing for the first time, his energy goes toward the rest of it. Toward making a friend. Toward trying something new. Toward the part of camp that actually changes him.
Practice it the week before, and the skills go with him. Into his cabin in July. And after that, too.
First-year families: Jessica hosts a Zoom each year the Thursday before camp starts. Watch your inbox.