Building confidence and resiliency in kids is essential to their psychological and social development. Camp provides children with experiences they need to build a sense of self-confidence and resilience by providing them with healthy amounts of responsibility and challenges in a safe environment. Whether it be a task as simple as cleaning up after themselves or helping a struggling friend at a program area, the camp experience offers children ways to build their confidence by allowing them the opportunity to face challenges themselves instead of being provided with cookie-cutter solutions whenever they are confronted with a problem. But confidence alone is not enough to get children through difficult challenges or future struggles they may face; building up a strong sense of resiliency is important so that a child’s confidence is not shattered the minute they are faced with a new difficulty.
One way of building resilience that Professor of Social Work Dr Michael Ungar suggests is to foster a powerful sense of identity in children: “A powerful identity that makes children feel confident in front of others provides children with something genuine to like about themselves.” By providing kids with tasks that allow for them to showcase their individual talents, they can feel confident and identify something within themselves that they genuinely like. A good camp counselor can help identify what it is a child is particularly good at, and provide activities or challenges for the camper to help foster these skills. This is especially important for kids that often feel marginalized at school and are consequently shyer in new situations and less likely to volunteer or want to showcase their skills because it provides them with an opportunity for others to appreciate their talents.
Another issue Dr Michael Ungar deems important in building resilience is helping kids feel in control of their lives: “Children who experience themselves as competent will be better problem solvers in new situations long after their laundry is cleaned and the smell of the campfire forgotten. The goal here is to encourage a child’s sense of internality, their perception that they have some say over their world and that the sources of the problems they encounter are properly attributed to either themselves (when they are to blame) or others (when, in truth, the child is an innocent victim of someone else’s mistake).” By letting kids face small challenges at camp without having an adult immediately jump in with a solution, kids build a stronger sense of confidence in themselves by exerting a certain amount of control over a situation.
Undoubtedly Camp allows children to face new challenges, try out new activities and develop new skills that they do not get the opportunity to experience every day. These challenges can be anything from cleaning up a mess to having a camper lead their group on a canoe; either way, situations like these allow for kids to build confidence in their ability to manage more challenging situations in all areas of their lives.They practice resiliency when they learn a new skill and stick at a task and their confidence grows immeasurably when they see their progress and achievements. To learn more about all the skill based confidence building activities offered at camp see: http://www.roughingit.com/daycamp/activities/
For more information on building resiliency in kids, see:
http://www.acacamps.org/campmag/1209/camps-help-make-children-resilient
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nurturing-resilience/201202/summer-camps-make-kids-resilient
