By the middle of June, many families in Texas, Florida and now LA are facing a new reality. Once the heat index climbs past 105, kids are stuck choosing between the pool and an air-conditioned environment. Sports practices are moved to 7 a.m. or canceled altogether, and afternoons that used to mean bikes and backyards now mean screens and drawn curtains. It isn’t anyone’s fault (hint: except global warming). It is what summer has become for many kids. When the Stein family in Austin started looking at Jewish overnight camps for their boys, one question kept surfacing that they’d never had to ask before: where could the boys go to be outside? Not for an hour before the heat set in, but for a real summer, the kind where being outdoors is simply the default and not a small window they have to plan around.

It’s a question more Jewish families are asking every year, and not just in Texas. Parents in Phoenix, Miami, and increasingly Los Angeles are describing the same pattern: a summer that used to mean bikes, backyards, and long evenings outside now means watching a heat advisory app and rearranging plans around it. Camp used to be the one guaranteed stretch of the year when a kid got that back. For a lot of families, it still can be. It just depends on where camp is.

Not on the Checklist, But Maybe It Should Be

Most families comparing camps start with cost, location, and programming. Weather rarely makes the list. But for more families in the South and Southwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic and increasingly the West, summer heat has stopped being background noise. It’s something they now plan an entire season around, from what time practices start to whether a family picnic can take place outside. 

That’s what eventually pointed the Stein family toward BB Camp, on the Oregon Coast, where the average high in July sits in the mid-70s. Not a rare cool front. Just an ordinary afternoon. For a family used to checking the heat index before letting their kids out the door, that number alone changed how they thought about what camp could be.

It’s easy to assume that kind of climate is a Pacific Northwest bonus, something nice but beside the point. For a family flying in from Texas, it isn’t beside the point. It’s closer to the whole reason they started looking somewhere other than the camp closest to home. Once you’ve watched your kids lose most of a summer to the heat, mild weather stops being a footnote and starts looking like the main event.

Camp Shouldn’t Come with an Indoor Version

One parent from Los Angeles told our BB Camp staff something that’s stayed with us. Her daughter had been to an LA camp before, but every summer she gravitated toward the same handful of activities. Not because she loved those best, but because they were the only ones she could get through comfortably in the afternoon heat by going inside an air-conditioned room. Archery, hikes, or basketball with her friends, she quietly opted out of all of it, not out of disinterest, but out of necessity. Her mom didn’t realize how much her daughter had been editing her own summer until she really thought about it afterward. It wasn’t one big decision. It was a dozen small ones, made session after session, that quietly shrunk what camp got to be for her.

“That’s a hard thing for a parent to watch,” remarked Talia Berg. “Camp is supposed to be where a kid tries the thing they’ve never tried, not where the weather makes that choice for them ahead of time.”

This is not a knock on air conditioning, or on the camps that lean on it to keep kids safe. In a lot of parts of the country, it’s simply necessary and yet many camps don’t even have it. But necessary and ideal aren’t the same thing, and a lot of parents are starting to notice the gap between them. Camp is supposed to be the place a kid comes home from with a new skill, a new friend, and a sunburn they’re weirdly proud of. It’s harder to get there when half the day is spent managing heat instead of just living in it.

Built Around Being Outside

“Families sometimes assume the Pacific Northwest is just a scenic backdrop for camp. It’s actually one of the reasons camp runs the way it does here. Our campers are outside for most of the day because the weather allows it, not in spite of it. That’s not something every camp can offer, and it’s a big reason more families are willing to send their kids across the country to get here,”

says CEO Michelle Koplan.

Koplan points to the same thinking that’s led more families outside the Pacific Northwest to give BB Camp a look in the first place. A family will fly a kid a thousand miles for the right college. More parents are starting to apply that same logic to camp, and choosing the one where summer still gets to look like summer, wherever that happens to be.

That plays out in small ways all day long at BB Camp. Ropes courses, zipline, and climbing wall activities are endless; visiting and learning about the vegetable garden is never at risk of being canceled; and cultural events in our outdoor amphitheater all run on schedule instead of getting shortened or moved indoors because of a heat advisory. It’s less a special feature of camp and more the water it all sits in.

Staff plan around the weather here too, just not in the way families are used to. Instead of building in backup indoor activities for the hottest part of the day, counselors plan full afternoons on the water, on the trails, and on the sports fields, because there’s rarely a reason not to. Rain gear gets more use than sunscreen some weeks, which is its own kind of trade, but it’s one most families say they’d take without a second thought.

The Summer They’d Been Missing

The Stein boys spent this past summer swimming, hiking, and ziplining on the Oregon Coast, outside for most of the day, every day. Their mom said it was the first summer in years where neither of them complained about being stuck inside. She noticed something else too. They came home tired in a way they hadn’t been in summers past, the good kind of tired, the kind that comes from a full day outside instead of a full day managing the heat.

No kid should have to trade a real camp experience for staying cool. At BB Camp, they don’t have to choose, whether they’re arriving from Portland, Austin, or LA. For a lot of these families, that’s the whole point of looking beyond their own backyard in the first place.

For families weighing the cost of a cross-country trip on top of camp itself, that shouldn’t be the thing that gets in the way either. BB Camp’s tuition already runs below the national average for Jewish overnight camps, and on top of that, 46% of campers received financial aid or a grant last year. BB Men’s Camp Association, Foundation for Jewish Camp, and Jewish Federation have generously provided grants so that as many kids as possible can benefit from a rich Jewish camp experience. These grants are available to all Jewish campers regardless of financial need. 

Distance is a real consideration for a lot of families, but it’s not one that has to compete with affordability. Camp can be both further away and still within reach. For a family like the Steins, the flight was never the hard part. Knowing that help was available if they needed it made the decision an easier one to make.

Written by Lee Lazarus