Worrying about your child’s success is in any parent’s DNA. Some do that by pushing a child to study, others use creative techniques to ensure the prosperity of their youngsters. Either way, you know that as a parent you will do your best to provide whatever you can to your son or daughter. Let’s talk about the benefits of summer camps for teens; a way to keep your child entertained while grooming him or her for the competitive twenty-first century environment.
1. Improve English Level
First of all, in today’s environment few things matter more than being a good communicator. Growing up in an international environment with various social media channels, it would be impossible to communicate well without speaking English. Hence, the main benefit of a summer camp for teens is improving their English skills.
2. Build Independence
The second one from the top is building your child’s independence. Being able to make quick rational decisions leads to success in any chosen career path. In a summer camp, your teenagers can learn how to make decisions themselves and see the results or consequences their choices bring them.
3. Build Self-Esteem
Similarly, if your youngster makes a good decision during the camp, he or she will be praised for his or her efforts. That, in turn, will lead to higher self-esteem and believing that they can achieve whatever they desire. These days it’s important to be competitive and seek recognition, which is only possible if teenagers believe in their abilities. Check out our tips on how to motivate your child at home here
4. Learn Decision Making
What’s more, giving your child a chance to be independent in the camp means he or she can make its own decisions. They would no longer need to ask for permission for simple things, instead they could make choices such as which food they are going to eat for breakfast or which activity they like the most. In the future, their choices will be a lot more complicated so learning this skill from a young age is hugely beneficial.
5. Inspire Creativity
Let’s not forget creativity. Companies no longer want to hire employees who blindly follow the rules. Instead, they love fresh ideas and creative minds. Scientifically, being creative isn’t considered genetics but rather a skill that can be gained. Being in a summer camp gives your teenager an opportunity to find their creative streak and start thinking out of the box.
6. Build Confidence and Break Out of ‘Labeling’
We’ve already mentioned why it’s important to build your child’s confidence. However, another part of being confident is the ability to break out of ‘labelling’. The teenagers who have high self-worth and believe in themselves are more likely to succeed in life because they don’t follow others’ examples. They prefer to take initiative and step out of their comfort zone to create something great.
7. Promote Teamwork
Spending a summer in a camp with other teenagers is an opportunity for your offspring to socialise with others and learn how to work in a team. Some kids are naturally team players, some are born leaders; either way both have to learn how to create successful team dynamics to excel in group tasks. In a summer camp, there are plenty of opportunities to work with different people from totally different backgrounds.
8. Learn How To Resolve Conflicts
That leads to the next point of conflict resolution. It’s a skill listed as highly desirable by many successful companies around the world. The more opportunities your teenager gets to work with different age/race/background/gender kids, the more likely they will know how to avoid pointless arguments and resolve any conflict easily.
9. Learn Tolerance and Respect
As a matter of fact, dealing with different people leads to tolerance and respect. Today’s environment is extremely sensitive to issues related to gender, age, race and others. Your kids may not instinctively know the difference, nor do they know why it is good/acceptable to be different, and that may lead to future conflicts and uncomfortable situations. In a summer camp your child will inadvertently learn how to approach and talk to someone who may adhere to different rules and regulations.
10. Improve Your Skills with Professionals
You have to be careful about choosing a summer camp and make sure that it’s led by professionals. In our camp in Malaysia, we choose the experts to equip your teenager with skills they can use in their everyday life. Your children should learn from the best and also spend time with professionals who are successful in their lives and careers. At a young age, it’s extremely important to have role models who inspire and lead by example.
11. Succeed and Fail in A Safe Environment
Another important benefit of summer camps is having a safe space for success and failure. As a teenager, life seems complicated and everyone is trying to find their space under the sun. A summer camp is a new place where nobody knows you, which means whatever goes wrong, it doesn’t matter that much. Your teenager does not need the pressure from their daily environment, in reality, it’s a lot better to try succeeding and learning from your mistakes with no judgment.
12. Learn How to Lead an Active Social Life
The part that your youngster will love the most is active social life. In a summer camp, your child will make so many new friends that he or she will be sad to leave. Building fast and strong relationships will be hugely beneficial in the future with a twenty-first century global environment. During the camp, your child will not only learn how to make friends from their home country but also from other countries, despite language and cultural barriers.
13. Become an Influencer and a Leader
All teenagers have a life in their home country. Unfortunately, sometimes the persona they have from their childhood is no longer who they want to be as a person. It’s very hard to change that back home but it’s easy to be whoever you want to be in the camp. Your child will have opportunities to discover their passions and become a leader among his or her peers. You may be surprised to see your youngster coming back as a new happier version!
14. Work Hard Play Hard
It’s a common phrase used in a competitive global environment. It’s no longer enough to be good at what you do. You have to be extraordinary at what you do and at the same time have a happy family, or social life, or both. There is so much pressure put on the young people and it’s overwhelming. Being in a summer camp, your teenager is put in situations that he or she has never been in before. Instead of suffering through that in their future job place, they will learn how to juggle social life and work in a safe environment with people who are in the same boat as them.
15. Creating a Routine
One more benefit of attending a summer camp is learning how to create a routine. Every teenager has likes and dislikes; some wake up early; some go to sleep late and so on. Whichever way it is, professionals in the camp should identify those tendencies and help your child create a routine that works the best for them. It’s important to study the given material but it’s even more important to learn when to study and how. Then the whole process becomes effortless.
16. Become World-Citizen
While participating in the summer camp, your teenager will meet different cultures’ people from all over the world. He or she will learn how to talk with others and learn more about the world surrounding them. As a teenager, it’s very easy to live in a small ‘high school – home – activities’ world but the camp provides an opportunity to expand the world around them and appreciate the differences.
17. Make The World a Better Place
Any camp has a purpose of teaching your child something valuable. Some may be sports orientated, others may be skill development focused, but all of them strive to make the world a better place. There are many global concerns that teenagers should be aware of and put their heads together in the camp to come up with interesting solutions. For example, in our last camp in Malaysia we had a business plan competition and all the teenagers came up with ‘green’ ecological business ideas!
18. Inspire Change
Projects mentioned above and more inspire the change in people. A change in a person can lead to a change in the whole world. A school teaches your child what to study and how to persevere, but a summer camp helps develop everyday talents and skills that can be used to create something beautiful. Our future depends on our children so we have to inspire a change in them to, in turn, have a change in the world.
