Make Camping Fun For the Kids

If you want to make your next camping trip fun for the kids and give them real world experience about leadership then put them in charge of planning and organizing the trip. Now camping means many things too many people so you will have to adapt this suggestion to your personal comfort level while enjoying the great outdoors.

For starters, this whole crazy idea may not work if a standby generator is a mandatory piece of camping gear for your family. You want to give your kids a sense of accomplishment for making this whole camping trip work by their own efforts. Stuffing a 40 ft. Winnebago with everything from their room at home will not do it. Make this a tent and sleeping bag trip only, even if it’s a cabin tent, and you will be well on your way to achieving that.

Give them a couple days to make a checklist of everything they think they will need for one or two days in the wilderness. Make them plan the activities that you will all do together while out in the woods. If you are going to a national park or a state park you can get information for suggested activities from the park web site or by requesting information by mail from the appropriate source. The possibilities are endless. Hiking, fishing, birdwatching, cataloging the fauna, or telling the story that makes a certain place historically significant are only starters.

You do want to set only one limitation on the amount of gear they can take. They must get everything to the car in one trip. You can cut them a little slack by prepacking things like tents, sleeping bags, and the coleman camp stoves so these bulky items do not count in the one trip limitation. Everything else including food, hygiene, and recreational stuff should be included in the one trip limitation. You may want to silently tuck a couple gallons of fresh water and other personal necessities out of the way in the car, just in case.

The camping trip is a win-win for the kids. If they remember all the essential gear or if they had to make choices between an electronic game and something that would make things more comfortable for everybody they would have received a good leadership lesson. If they went in the other direction and packed only personal recreational items they would have learned a lesson about cooperation and personal responsibility here too. And you never had to say a word.