Life Without Page: This camp is the worst teenager’s nightmare
Summer for teens Not in the workplace, hot, boring, and the ideal time to close the door and spend every moment of waking up, watching, playing, texting, broadcasting – anything but talking – by phone. Almost half of teens in the United States say that they are almost constantly online, adults become more disappointed in their lives to destroy them. Families create screen -free areas in their homes, states are banning schools in schools, and a new type of summer camps has emerged: digital detox camps, which can spend about $ 2,000 a week, promising to get the participants out of the screen by going to cold turkeys for summer.
Wired spoke to the founder and manager of one of these organizations. According to a sign of its summer mid -range camp, this program makes the kids change their phones and game systems for some of the old social interactions. But in other ways, this is something other than traditional: this is with the therapists at the scene equipped with screen addiction, kids are going through financial literacy, and almost all camps are completely miserable when arriving.
More Children who come to our program are very social. They don’t communicate very well. Everything is in the abbreviations. They do not make eye contact. They can’t finish a complete sentence. Everything is amazing. They do not want to have in -person conversation. They prefer to do this online or do it through the text.
Our camp is about 70 percent of boys, 30 percent of girls from ages 13 to 17 years. Most of the boys are gamer. Most girls are addicted to social media – Wannabes in fluores. None of them want to be there. A baby escaped and he actually moved it to the freeway, which was very unusual because we were not close to the freeway. He was selected by the local highway patrol and returned. He then went on a hunger strike for three days, and we actually arrived at the hospital because he needed to eat. And then his mother came and chose him.
When the kids arrive, we open them to make sure they bring everything they were supposed to bring and do not bring the things they are not supposed to bring. Like a child’s phone, it appeared with three cell phones: when it arrived, it became one. We found another cellphone in his bag. And then about three days later his roommate came out of him and we found the third phone. He thought he was funny that he had been away for a long time. These are most of our kids – if they can attach it to the man, then they will win.
Most kids are not aggressive, they do not act. Most of the time, they are moving. But when they came out of their dormitory, we lock the doors. I say, “Sitting in your dorm room is not a camp activity.”
Sleeping habits and eating are terrible. Most kids, especially online gamers, increase by 2 or 3am. They don’t get up until noon or afterwards. This is a disaster. And their eating habits, they are just as terrible – Doritos and Gatorade, terrible snack food.
So we’ve put them in a very specific program. They are in their dorm room at 9:30 and show their lights up to 10. And then we wake them up at 6:30. I always say to my employees, “Plan not to sleep in the first week.”
