Stargazing Skeptics, S’mores, & Dangerously Curious Kids

Does the idea of shipping off your precious kiddo for a week in the wilderness with a bunch of strangers (and even stranger counselors) trigger your parental separation anxiety?

I get it, but you know what? They’ll survive. You’ll survive. On top of that, it will forge them into the strong, independent freethinkers you hope they’ll someday be. Or maybe you can’t wait to send them off, that’s OK too. I say this because my own journey towards adventurous reason began with a desperate, ill-conceived payphone call in the dead of the night, from a place that smelled suspiciously of sugar overdoses and existential dread.

That first summer at camp, I must have been eight or nine, which was such a tender age for the grand act of rebellion to come. Until that week, I was never the troublemaker. A perfect A-student, the first with my hand up in every class, but especially during Bible class. But that first week of camp, to put it mildly, was a character-building inferno. Convinced that my parents had forever abandoned me, that I would not survive that week, that I’d be left alone in the woods forever, I hatched a plan.

In the middle of the second night there, I nervously waited for the snores of my roommates and counselor to commence before I quietly slipped out into the darkness of the eerie camp property. A pint-sized fugitive, no doubt fueled by too much candy and misplaced indignation, my heart pounding like a jackhammer, I approached the Kandy Kabin with its glowing payphone booth.

While the candy inside the window beckoned me to commit further criminal acts, I kindly asked the payphone operator to place a collect call to my parents. I delivered my ultimatum with all the dramatic flair that the overactive imagination of a child thespian-cum-escape-artist could dream up: “If you don’t come and get me, I’m walking home and never talking to you again!”

They didn’t come.

Instead, they outsourced my emotional meltdown to the Camp’s Program Director, who then outsourced it to a man who became one of my first heroes, known by all the campers affectionately as simply, “Moe.” He found me, presumably looking like a feral Ewok, and walked with me until the tears stopped and my heart beat slowed.

Moe never treated campers like they were kids; he took care to make sure that we all knew he saw us, believed in us, and wanted us to be successful. That night, something clicked. While my grand escape had failed and my dramatic threat lacked teeth, the world hadn’t ended. I wasn’t walking home, I was stuck at a camp. And you know what? It was fantastic.

Camp went from a forest prison to my favorite time of year. That single, failed act of defiance was surely one of the most dramatic of the staff’s year, though if they handed out prizes, I never received mine. It was the tiny big bang for my independence and questioning of the reality I thought I knew. It taught me that my parents were not minions I could summon, that problems could be navigated and survived without my folks’ intervention, and that sometimes, the most profound growth comes from being utterly and terrifyingly on your own, even if “on your own” is just 200 yards from a counselor armed with a first-aid kit and a walkie-talkie. This first taste of forced autonomy – something I’m pretty sure I had even asked and begged for before trying to revolt, was a proving ground lesson in resilience. It was the seed that later grew into a life of travel, adventure, and always wondering what’s just around the next corner. A few decades on and I’ve traveled extensively, swapped a real bed for two years on a sailboat in the Puget Sound, summited mountains, rafted rivers, and have lovingly embraced the absurdity of living a life off-script as often as possible. And it all started with that damn payphone.

So, while I might not believe most of what was taught to me back at that religious summer camp, here I am preaching the gospel of sending your kids to camp. Every kid, especially a kid being raised to think for themselves, deserves that payphone moment of their own. That raw, unfiltered, unsupervised chance to realize that they are a separate, capable entity in this beautiful, scary, and exciting world. Since my days at camp, the world has become increasingly saturated with curated experiences and helicopter parenting but summer camp offers a rare, wildly glorious dose of managed chaos and self-discovery that every kid should get to experience.

But for our community, not just any camp will do. I’ve worked at religious and YMCA camps, only one of those would I recommend looking at, but the Y has a long history of religious attachment that lives on at quite a few of their camp locations, unfortunately. Thankfully, instead of sending your kids to a camp that weaves tales of divine intervention into campfire s’more time, there’s a growing, and I believe vital, movement of secular summer camps designed to foster critical thinking, ethical living, and a profound appreciation for the natural world – without a whiff of supernatural coercion. (Maybe a snipe hunt or two, I’m not sure, but having never actually seen or captured a snipe, who’s to say they’re not real?)

These secular camp options are places where the only spirits present are ones of camaraderie and intellectual curiosity. These camps stay away from the ethereal and instead focus on encouraging kids on how to think, not what to think. The oldest of these options is Camp Quest, where parents have reported back with similar experiences that I had, seemingly without the payphone calls: “He’s still sharing stuff with us about what he learned and different activities, so overall, I think what went well mostly was that his very first experience sleeping away from family in a new environment with all new people was a success and he wants to go back next year.”

So, where can you send your budding skeptics for a dose of summer independence? Our community has cooked up some magnificent alternatives that are absolute playgrounds for reason:

• Camp Quest: With several locations and different schedules to choose from across the country, Camp Quest is all about “fun, friends, and freethought,” mixing science, natural wonder, and humanist values. While teaching kids to tie physical knots, they’re teaching them to untie ideological ones. With signature programs like “Famous Freethinkers™” and “Socrates Café,” they encourage campers to ask my favorite question: “why,” and to explore different worldviews with respect, and to understand that integrity and empathy are the bedrock of a good life – no gods required. They focus on humanist ethics, critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and worldview awareness, all while letting kids be kids in the great outdoors, no screens required. 2025 Camp Locations: Washington, Arizona, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Maryland.
• Camp 42: Taking its wonderfully nerdy name from my favorite humanist author, Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Camp 42 aims to “change the world by providing a reason-based inclusive camp experience designed to create caring and inquisitive humans.” They weave critical thinking, ethics, scientific inquiry, philosophy, and social justice into traditional camp activities. It’s a place where kids are encouraged to actively create meaning in their own lives and make a positive impact. 2025 Camp Location: South Carolina
• Camp Omni: Camp Omni is dedicated to growing “confidence, community, and kindness by fostering critical thinking, social-emotional learning, and joy in a safe, secular, outdoor camp experience.” They focus on building emotional resilience and intelligence, encouraging respectful discourse rooted in humanism and science-based principles, and helping kids understand how to evaluate information in an age of overload. It’s about empowering young minds to think independently and critically. Camp Location: California

These options are so much more than a place to park your kids for a week while you paint the town; they are incubators for the next generation of thinkers, doers, and compassionately-ethical human beings. In a world dominated by the digital, camp gives kids not just a chance for independence, but a chance to connect with the natural world that is more foreign than it has ever been in the history of humanity. These three camps provide a space where asking tough questions are celebrated, where diversity is a strength, and where community is built on shared values, not shared dogma, away from the influence of social media.

Eight-year-old me, tears streaming while I fumed by the payphone, wasn’t really staging a protest; I was taking my first wobbly steps towards self-reliance and thinking for myself. My parents, by not rushing to my rescue, gave me a far greater gift than a ride home and a lifetime of self-doubt – they gave me the space to figure life out for myself. These camps offer that same gift, without the Thursday-night altar call. They’re a launchpad for young humanists, a place where kids can test their wings, flex their independence and critical thinking skills, explore this fantastic planet, and maybe realize they don’t need to call home to solve every problem, becoming the kind of inconveniently thoughtful, empathetic, gloriously independent humans this world desperately needs more of.