by Jenna Payette
Every summer, millions of parents watch their children walk through the gates of a summer camp and return weeks later somehow… different.
Summer camp and child brain development are closely linked, as these experiences can help kids become more confident. More independent. More willing to try new things.
For decades, this transformation has been called “the magic of camp.” According to Matthew Kaufman, camp director and author of The Campfire Effect: How to Engineer Belonging in a Disconnected World, it isn’t magic at all.
“Magic doesn’t exist in the real world,” Kaufman told Lianne Castelino during an interview for Where Parents Talk. “It’s neuroscience. It’s brain chemicals.”
Kaufman has spent more than 40 years at the same summer camp — first as a four-year-old camper, then as a counsellor, division leader, and now director.
He explains why camp has such a profound impact on the developing brains of children. For him, camp is a science-backed tool for raising resilient, connected kids in today’s screen-saturated world.
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If there’s one thing Kaufman wants parents to understand, it’s that children don’t grow simply because they’re challenged. They grow because they feel safe enough to be challenged.
At the centre of that process is oxytocin, often called the “bonding hormone.” Released through trust, rituals, familiarity, and meaningful relationships, oxytocin lays the neurological foundation for everything camp is designed to do.
“Camps have sort of stumbled upon this magic recipe through 100 plus years of trial and error,” Kaufman says. “The best camps are intentional, and the best camps build intentional communities.”
For children, belonging isn’t just something that feels good. It’s what tells the brain that it’s safe to explore, take risks, and learn.
That sense of safety doesn’t happen through one big moment. It develops through dozens of small interactions over the course of a day — a counsellor remembering a child’s name, a cabin mate inviting them into a game, a compliment during an art project, or a reassuring arm around the shoulder after a difficult moment.
Those seemingly ordinary experiences are quietly preparing the brain for growth.
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Once children feel that sense of belonging, camp begins asking them to do something harder.
Introduce yourself to others.
Try the climbing wall.
Perform in front of others.
These experiences naturally trigger cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. While cortisol often gets a bad reputation, Kaufman says parents shouldn’t think of it as something to avoid.
“Cortisol is not an evil chemical,” he says. “Cortisol is only bad for you when it’s not moderated.”
When a child tries something new, faces a fear, or steps into an unfamiliar situation, cortisol naturally spikes. For many children, camp is a place where these kinds of opportunities are abundant. However, the presence of supportive counsellors, peers, and a safe environment also triggers the release of oxytocin and serotonin — chemicals that moderate the cortisol and allow growth to happen. Camp works because children aren’t experiencing stress alone.
“There’s a difference between a child in distress and a child in eustress,” Kaufman says. “Eustress is this positive stress where you’re learning, you’re growing. It’s hard. You’re feeling this surge of adrenaline. But it’s in a supported and safe environment.”
When cortisol goes unmoderated — as it so often does in schools and workplaces without the intentional structures camp provides — “it almost becomes like a toxin in your body.”
For parents, the takeaway is significant: the goal is not to shield children from stress. It’s to ensure they experience stress in supported, safe conditions. As it turns out, camp is one of the most effective environments ever designed to do exactly that.
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Kaufman knows firsthand what that support can look like. As a young camper, he recalls being painfully shy and intensely homesick. He cried for weeks. Yet, rather than pushing him away, camp slowly welcomed him into its community.
“The time when you sit and you’re doing an art project and your friend next to you says, ‘Hey, I really like your picture.’ Or when you’re struggling and your counsellor comes over and puts their arm around you and says, ‘That’s okay. You can hang out with me until you’re ready.’ It’s an accumulation of moments like that that build safety.”
That, he says, is why safety isn’t the absence of challenge. It’s the presence of trust.
“You can’t do anything unless you feel safe,” Kaufman says. “You can’t grow, you can’t learn, you can’t do anything.”
Can a child make a mistake without being ridiculed? Can they fail and laugh about it? Can they try something new without fear of judgment?
That same principle, he argues, applies in classrooms. The most effective teachers understand that students learn best when they first feel like they belong.
“They take a few minutes in their lesson or in their day and they create some kind of ritual or some kind of experience for kids to make them feel like they belong in that classroom,” he says. “It’s not a waste of five minutes. It buys them the other 40 minutes of the class time to actually get some learning done.”
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Belonging and healthy stress aren’t the only ingredients camp gets right.
One of the most surprising parts of Kaufman’s research is the role of endorphins — the brain’s natural feel-good chemicals.
“People think of endorphins and the classic term is the runner’s high,” he says. “But people don’t realize this — endorphins are also released when you laugh. And at camp, we do a lot of laughing. We do a lot of laughing and singing and dancing. And that releases a ton of endorphins.”
Those camp songs, silly traditions, and spontaneous dance parties may seem like simple fun, but they’re serving an important neurological purpose. Endorphins help flush cortisol from the body, allowing children to recover from challenges and prepare for the next one.
In other words, the fun isn’t separate from the learning — it helps make the learning possible.
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If camp is so effective, why does that confidence sometimes seem to disappear by the fall?
“When you leave the bubble of camp, it is so much more challenging to recreate the environment where there is an intentional sense of belonging,” he says.
Unsurprisingly, screens and social media play a significant role in eroding what camp builds.
“For children, especially teenagers, that is putting up a wall between them and other people for real world connections. They have all of these screen connections, but none of the real world connections. And in order for real growth to happen, you need the support of other people.”
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The good news, Kaufman says, is that parents don’t need to recreate summer camp to recreate some of its benefits. They can start with something much smaller: rituals.
“If you want to start with something today, start with adding some kind of ritual for your child,” he says. The ritual itself doesn’t need to be elaborate. It could be a special goodbye before school, a family tradition at bedtime, or three squeezes of the hand before getting on the school bus — each squeeze meaning I love you.
What matters, Kaufman says, is that the ritual is meaningful, emotional, sacred, and scripted — an acronym he calls MESS.
“It grounds the child in a sense of safety. And build upon that — the more rituals you have, the better.”
Those consistent moments remind children that belonging isn’t something tied to one moment in time. It’s something they can carry with them every day.
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In a world of helicopter parenting and over-scheduling, one of Kaufman’s most powerful ideas is the distinction between supporting a child and rescuing one — and he uses a climbing wall to illustrate it.
“When a child is climbing a climbing wall, they’re harnessed in, attached to a rope, and someone’s holding that rope. That person is called a belayer. The belayer is not climbing the climbing wall for the child. They’re supporting the child.”
His advice to parents is simple: always ask yourself whether you are climbing for your child or belaying them.
“You don’t want to be the parent that takes away the thrill and the joy and the learning that comes from climbing a climbing wall. You also don’t want to be the parent that sends the child up the climbing wall with no harness whatsoever.”
The balance, he says, is where growth happens.
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As the father of a two-year-old, Kaufman is already thinking ahead — resisting the urge to do things for his daughter that she can do herself, even now.
“There’s a little voice in the back of my head saying, ‘Just count to three before you go in and help her, see if she can figure it out.’ And I’m getting better at it.”
For families weighing the cost and logistics of camp, he frames it directly as an investment in human skills that schools do not teach — and that artificial intelligence cannot replicate.
“AI can code, but what AI can’t do are some of the soft skills. AI can’t put their arm around another person and say, ‘Hey, I know how you’re feeling and we’re going to get through this together.’ Those are the kinds of skills that camp teaches. Camp teaches us how to be good people, how to be good teammates, and how to be good leaders.”
Ultimately, Kaufman believes parents shouldn’t expect camp to be perfect.
“Camp is not always perfect for children. And it’s not supposed to be,” he says. “Kids are going to learn that they can overcome struggles, they can do hard things — and they do that with the help of their peers and supportive staff members. If it’s perfect, children are not learning anything.”
Perhaps that’s why children come home from camp looking a little different than when they left. Not because camp is magical, but because it gives them something every developing brain needs: a place to belong, the confidence to struggle, and the support to discover they are capable of far more than they imagined.
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