Without an Audience

Kabeyun’s approach to sharing photos

When daily photo-sharing first emerged in the mid-2000s, many camps were quick to adopt it. Kabeyun, as it often does, chose a different path. Nearly twenty years later, we've revisited that decision more than once, and we keep arriving at the same conclusion. 

A few summers ago, I watched a parent drop off their son at the beginning of the session. The boy – maybe ten or eleven years old – grabbed his pack and headed toward the cabin alongside one of his counselors without looking back. The parent stood there for a moment, watching him go, then turned to me with a familiar expression. Not quite a smile, not quite concern, something in between. "How am I supposed to know he's okay?" they said.

I've been answering that question, in some form or another, for years: you have to trust him, you have to trust us, and that’s hard. That's kind of the point.

At Kabeyun, we don't post daily photos for parents to scroll through while their camper is away. No Instagram feed, no parent portal updates pushed out every afternoon. It's a deliberate choice we made nearly 20 years ago and, believe it or not, most of our families come to appreciate it.

Camp is, for many of our boys, the first time they've felt responsible for themselves in an environment that belongs to them. Not to their parents, not to their school, not to their coach. It’s theirs. They decide how far and how hard to push themselves on the ropes course. They choose whether to sign up for sailing or pottery, or both. They navigate the small daily frictions of cabin life – who gets the top bunk, what to do when a friend is frustrated with them, how to ask a counselor for help – without a parent there to step in and smooth the way. For many of our campers, this summer will be the first chance they've had to face those challenges in this way.

That growth doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it’s often painstakingly gradual. A boy who gets up on the wakeboard after two weeks of trying – the expression on his face in that moment is something you'd give anything to witness. But the reason it looks like that is, in part, because he worked for it without an audience, without concern for what it looked like from the outside looking in. He kept showing up, kept trying, and then one morning it happened. It was his.

Here's what I've come to understand: a daily photo feed doesn't just change a parent’s experience of camp. It changes the camper's experience, too. When they know their parents are watching – even from a distance, even through a screen – it shifts something in how they inhabit this place. Camp works because it's theirs. It's a space where they get to be who they're becoming, not just who they've been. That's harder when home is a tap away.

For parents, letting your son disappear into a world you can't see – trusting that he's okay, trusting the people here are taking care of him, trusting him to handle whatever comes up – that's hard. It's supposed to be! The same way camp asks your son to step beyond his comfort zone and try things that feel uncertain and a little scary, it asks you to do something similar. To sit with not knowing. To let him own his summer independent of you. That's not a small thing, and it's easier for me to say than it is to do. I know that. My kids went away to camp, too, and it was considerably harder to experience than to explain to and ask of others.

Although we do not share them immediately, we do take photos at Kabeyun, all summer long, and all over camp, with counselors taking care not to let the act of taking photos interfere with the camper’s experience in the moment. At the end of the season, we upload everything to our website, where you can download any or all of them in high resolution. You'll see your camper’s face, see what he was doing, get glimpses of his summer. But you'll get them after – after he's had the chance to live it first, without the awareness of being documented. The photos will show you something real, because nothing in them was posed for your benefit.

Your son will be okay at Kabeyun. He's in a place that's held boys just like him for over a hundred years, with people devoted to his wellbeing. You don't need a daily photo to know that. You just need to trust it – and let him have this.

He'll be home before you know it, with stories you didn't see coming