Overnight Camp Video Series - A Stepping Stone, How Times Have Changed

At Avid4 Adventure Overnight Camps, kids have the opportunity to develop the skills and confidence which they can carry into all aspects of their lives beyond camp. Avid4 Adventure CEO, Paul Dreyer explains two reasons to send your child to Overnight Camp.

Full Video Transcript:

Hi Parents. My name is Paul and I serve as our CEO here at Avid4 Adventure. Thanks so much for joining us.

This is part of a new series of really small videos that we made for you to help you understand our overnight camp programming a little bit more. We know that choosing an overnight camp for your kid is just a big choice. It’s a big choice for you and it’s a big choice for them. So hopefully these videos will help you with that choice.

In this first video you get to spend about 5 minutes with me and I want to start with the why. Why Overnight Camp? Why do that in the first place with your kiddo? I have two reasons that I want to share with you.

One is that it may serve as a developmental stepping stone in your child's life. I know you’ve looked through our website and you know our mission right? Our mission is to empower kids to lead active and healthy lifestyles in the outdoors but when I think about the how -- how we make that mission possible -- it has always been through a a step by step approach. When we started Avid4 Adventure in 2004 the goal was always to provide that empowerment through a developmental step by step approach. Our hope has always been that that your child would have a first initial touch point maybe through an Avid4 Adventure school program or an event with us. Then, they would build confidence and build some of the skills through engagement with our Day Camps -- that would be the next step. Then, the full expression of that empowerment might be coming to Overnight Camp to do an expedition with us where where your child leaves home. Perhaps for the first, or maybe longest time in their life, to really step into to that feeling of doing things for themselves in a group setting for perhaps the first time in their life. So that's my reason number one.

Reason number two for me is at Overnight Camp we truly see kids develop their risk assessment skills. If you’re watching this video, you’re most likely a parent and you’re probably similar in age to me or at least we may be the same generation. So this next part you can relate to. I want you to travel back to your childhood and imagine just coming back from school. You throw your backpack on the ground, maybe you grab a quick snack, and then you’re out the door right? I remember I was out the door after school. I would usually grab a soccer ball, maybe you were on your bike or just going to meet up with your neighborhood friends and and all afternoon you were outside. Your parents, they were doing their thing, you were doing your thing and then, sometime around dusk, 6 o'clock maybe and you'd start to hear these calls “DAVID DINNER TIME, JOEY, SUZIE!” These calls would come from all the neighborhood parents and all the neighborhood moms calling their kids back home. Those calls we don’t hear anymore. These days we don’t see kiddos just out in the neighborhoods.

Maybe you can remember this image: I’m sure you have a very specific image of your childhood playground, right? I remember the the specifics of my childhood playground. Now, when I go to childhood playgrounds these days I see only rounded edges on every part of the structure and I see soft surfaces. We seem to have lost from our childhood those moments, truly being out on our own or just with our friends where we had to make judgement calls and decisions on our own. Whether it’s a childhood playground or those other aspects of our childhood where we could really get hurt right and we really had to develop those risk management skills.

As we know in these days, in these times, and in our culture, a lot of those opportunities have been lost. Overnight Camp -- in a safe place, in a controlled boundary -- kids still have those those perceived and real risks that they can step into and develop not only the confidence in themselves, but develop the risk management skills to then re-enter middle school, high school and beyond, armed with the ability to to say no to a friend when they’re making a bad choice. Or to say no to themselves when they're making a bad choice. That’s what you get when you sign up for Overnight Camp.

I know that you may have specific questions on which overnight camp should my child do at Avid and we have more videos that will help guide those specific decisions. Hopefully my words here have given you a little bit of a picture of, "Wow this is something that every kid needs as their next step in life, the next step in building the confidence and skills that they need." Thanks so much for listening and definitely check out other parts of our website and other videos as part of this series for some more specific information. Thanks.

For more information on Avid4 Adventure Overnight Camps in Colorado for 1st-12th grades, click the button below.