10 Things Your Kid's Camp Won't Tell You

According to the American Camp Association (ACA), there are currently about 7,000 overnight “sleepaway” programs to choose from in the U.S. And the number of day camps, where kids return home each evening, has increased 90 percent since the 1980s, to roughly 5,000 today—in large part because they’re now offering extended day sessions to meet parents’ needs and are accepting younger children. But picking the right camp for your kid can be daunting: Of the 12,000 or so options, only about 2,400 have ACA accreditation, a voluntary process in which the camp meets more than 300 different standards. (Visit the organization’s website, www .acacamps.org, for its “Find a Camp” database of accredited programs.)

While other, nonaccredited camps may be perfectly legitimate options, you’ll need to do a little more homework to be sure. First, check out the Web directory KidsCamps.com, where you can search a database of camps based on geography and interests. To get a better feel for how a camp operates, call its director and ask about staff screening procedures—whether the camp does background checks—and its staff return rates (anything over 50 percent is good). Then ask about the staff-to-camper ratio: Look for 1-to-4 for very young kids and 1-to-8 for older campers. And make sure the camp has a state permit or license that requires it to meet minimum safety requirements. Most important, get references from a prospective camp. “Ask for people in your hometown,” advises Christopher Thurber, a New Hampshire psychologist and coauthor of The Summer Camp Handbook. “That means they can’t handpick the people you talk to.”