Every summer, parents across Virginia ask some version of the same question: is camp actually worth it? The cost, the logistics, the separation anxiety — is there something happening at camp that couldn’t happen at home, or at a week of local activities, or just in a summer with more unstructured time?

The research says yes. And it’s more compelling than most parents realize.

I recently had the chance to talk with Virginia Living about this — about why I built VirginiaSummerCamp.com and what I believe camp does for kids that’s genuinely hard to replicate anywhere else. That conversation is a good starting point, but I want to go deeper here, because the American Camp Association’s research deserves more than a bullet point.

The Organization Behind the Data

The American Camp Association is the national accrediting body for summer camps. When you see ACA accreditation on a camp’s website, it means that camp has met rigorous standards across health, safety, programming, and staff training. Many of the best camps in Virginia are ACA-accredited, and it’s one of the first things I look for when evaluating programs for this site.

The ACA has also funded some of the most significant research into what camp actually does to children — longitudinally, measurably, over time. Here’s what they found.

Kids Learn to Connect With People Who Are Different From Them

This is the finding that stops me every time I cite it: 93 percent of campers reported that camp helped them get to know kids who are different from themselves. In an era when children’s social worlds are increasingly sorted — by neighborhood, by school district, by algorithm — that’s a meaningful number.

Camp is one of the few environments where a child from Roanoke ends up in a cabin with kids from Richmond, Northern Virginia, and rural Southwest Virginia, and has to figure out how to share space, collaborate, and become friends. More than 90 percent also reported that camp helped them make new friends generally — but the diversity finding is the one with longer-term implications.

Foundational social skills built at ten, eleven, twelve years old carry forward. The child who learned to navigate difference at camp carries that into high school, college, and the workplace.

Independence and Self-Awareness Develop Faster Away From Home

The ACA’s National Camp Impact Study — the first longitudinal study of its kind in the camping industry — tracked youth outcomes across multiple years and found the most compelling evidence in three areas: independence, social awareness, and affinity for nature.

Independence is the obvious one. When a child is away from parents for the first time, managing their own schedule, belongings, and decisions, they develop a sense of ownership over their own lives that is genuinely hard to build at home no matter how intentional a parent you are. Psychologist Michael Thompson has written about this extensively — the dynamic shifts the moment a child steps outside the family structure.

Social awareness — the ability to read a room, understand how their behavior affects others, navigate group dynamics — develops in the friction of communal living in ways that a summer of individual activities simply doesn’t produce.

If you’re weighing whether your child is ready for that step, our guide How Do I Know If My Child Is Ready for Overnight Camp? walks through the specific signs to look for.

Emotional Intelligence Gets a Workout

Few environments develop emotional intelligence as effectively as camp. Away from parents, without the usual social scaffolding of school friend groups, children are required to regulate their emotions in real time: navigate conflict without an adult mediating every disagreement, manage disappointment when they don’t make a team or a part, and find their footing in a new social environment from scratch.

This is uncomfortable. It’s also exactly the kind of productive discomfort that builds emotional resilience. The children who have the hardest first two days at camp are often the ones who grow the most by the end of the session.

The practical side of preparing kids for that discomfort — before drop-off day — is covered in Preparing Your Child and Yourself for Summer Camp.

Leadership Becomes Accessible to Every Kid

School narrows leadership. There are a limited number of class president roles, team captain spots, and student council seats. The same kids tend to hold them year after year.

Camp democratizes leadership because the opportunities rotate constantly and the contexts are unfamiliar to everyone. The child who isn’t a natural leader at school finds themselves in a situation where they know something nobody else does — how to start a fire, navigate a trail, handle a horse — and suddenly they’re the expert. That moment of being the one others look to is formative in a way that’s hard to engineer.

ACA research found that high-quality camp experiences consistently build leadership capacity across a broad range of children — not just the ones already identified as leaders.

The Mental Health Case for Camp

This one matters more than it did five years ago. ACA president Tom Rosenberg has been direct about it: camp plays a vital role in the development of the whole child, and that includes mental health — particularly given the disruption children experienced during and after the pandemic.

The mental health benefits aren’t primarily about therapeutic intervention. They’re about the basics: physical activity, time in nature, face-to-face relationships, a structured sense of purpose, and genuine belonging to a community. These are the conditions that support mental health in children, and they’re increasingly hard to find in ordinary daily life.

Camp, almost by design, delivers all of them at once.

Long-Term: The Skills That Carry Into the School Year

The ACA’s conclusion from their longitudinal research is worth stating plainly: when youth are given the opportunity to attend quality camp experiences, they build key skills — independence, social awareness, perseverance — and those skills drive outcomes that support learning throughout the school year.

This is the part parents don’t always expect. Camp isn’t a break from development — it’s an accelerant of it. Children who attend quality summer programs return to school in September noticeably more confident, more socially engaged, and more resilient. Virginia families report this consistently, and the research backs them up.

What This Means for Choosing a Camp

The research is about quality camp experiences — not just any summer program. The variables that drive these outcomes are consistent across studies: trained staff, intentional programming, opportunities for increasing responsibility, and a culture where every child belongs.

ACA accreditation is a meaningful proxy for those variables. It’s not the only signal — plenty of excellent smaller camps haven’t pursued accreditation — but it’s a reliable starting point. Our guide to choosing the right sleepaway camp covers what else to look for beyond the accreditation badge.

Search Virginia’s summer camps → and filter by type, location, age range, and accreditation status to find programs that match what your child needs this summer.

Get ready for camp with our custom printables – everything from camp packing lists and camp countdowns to ideas from moms and dads while the kiddos are at camp!