Without an Audience
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 years ago, I watched a parent dropping off their camper at the start of their first summer. The camper – they were probably ten or eleven years old – grabbed their “go-bag” and headed off toward their cabin with their counselor without so much as a quick glance back. The parent stood there with me, watching them go, then mumbled “Now what? How will I know how they’re doing, if they’re okay?”
I’ve been answering some version of that question for years: trust them, trust us, I get it – it’s not easy… but what’s that saying? It’s a feature, not a bug?
At Kabeyun, we don’t post daily photos for families to scroll through while their camper is away. No Instagram feed, no updates pushed out every afternoon. It’s a deliberate choice we made more than twenty years ago and, believe it or not, once they hear why that’s the path we’ve chosen, our families appreciate it.
Camp is, for many of our campers, 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, try out for the play, or get up on stage to sing or play an instrument. 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. Their first summer at Kabeyun is typically the first opportunity they’ve had to face those challenges on their own.
That growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it’s often painstakingly gradual. A camper who gets up on the wakeboard after two weeks of trying – the expression on their face in that moment is something their mom or dad would probably give anything to witness. But part of the the reason it looks and feels the way it does is precisely because they worked for it without an audience, without concern for what it looked like from the outside looking in. Their effort and their persistence was for them – they kept showing up, kept trying, and one day it clicked and they got it, and they got to own that, all for themselves. It was theirs.
What I’ve come to understand is this: 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 their place. 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 click or a tap away.
For parents, letting your child disappear into a world you can’t see and don’t have immediate access to – trusting that they’re okay, trusting that the people here are taking care of them, trusting them to handle whatever comes their way – that’s hard, and it’s meant to be! The same way camp asks your child to step beyond their 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 them own their summer independent of you. That’s not a small thing, and it’s easier for me to say than it is for you to do. I know that. My children 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 campers’ experience in the moment. At the end of the season, we upload everything to our website, where families can download any or all of them in high resolution. You’ll see your camper’s face, see what they were doing, get glimpses of their summer. But you’ll get them after – after they’ve 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 child will be okay at Kabeyun. They’re in a place that’s held campers just like them for over a hundred years, with people devoted to their wellbeing. You don’t need a daily photo to know that. You just need to trust it – and let them have this.