Summerland Camps Season Wrap!
Celebrating Our 10th Summer Season!
Summerland Camps is excited to embark on our 10th continuous year of operations as we approach the summer of 2027. Summerland Camps offers a premium experience by limiting each session to 12 participants or fewer per group (males, females, and young adults comprise seperate groups), ensuring every camper receives focused, individualized attention.
. With an industry-leading camper-to-staff ratio of approximately 1:2, we provide the individualized attention and support needed to create lasting change.
Our mission is to help adolescents, teens, and young adults regain control of their digital lives, develop healthier tech habits, and unlock their full potential. In a world increasingly dominated by screens, we offer a transformative, immersive experience designed to build resilience, balance, and purpose.
What We Believe
The Problem
Adolescents and teens are growing up in a different world today than their parents did. Screens are literally everywhere, and technology is a part of our lives. So we need to learn to live in balance. Many of our children will grow up to work with computers and will get their news from a tablet instead of a newspaper. So the problem cannot be solved by just swearing off-screen time- it’s almost everywhere we look today.
We stay positive at Summerland Camps- our core belief is that change is best when it comes from within.
At Summerland, we don’t like to say the word “addiction.” Yes, you can find it on our website, but that is simply to discuss the problem and also to help people find our camp when searching online.
A better term is “habit.” Habits are learned, and habits can be changed. Often, people think of an “addiction” as overpowering, and it’s a built-in excuse to fail. Historically, an “addiction” involves tolerance and withdrawal effects, in addition to psychoactive changes. While it can be argued that computer gaming produces these effects, we take a different approach. For more information, please read our blog post, “Is Video Game Addiction Real?”
Something that compounds the problem is how new digital media or “screen time” is overused. Doctors and therapists alike usually have no training in the subject, and the term “gaming addiction treatment” is so new that hardly anyone knows exactly what that entails. We do know, however, that gaming addiction treatment is best achieved when a teen is removed from their home environment for a total reset opportunity.
More than Anything Else, We Must Be a Positive and Motivating Force for Change
At Summerland, we believe people must want to change. The knee-jerk reaction to parenting is often to punish, yell, or take away. But this does not build intrinsic motivation, and the results are only temporary. Our first step at Summerland is to build rapport with our campers and get them interested in creating new habits.
We take a “coaching” philosophy with our counselors as opposed to an authoritarian stance. We help campers pick positive, healthy goals they want to work on and we help them develop a realistic plan to move forward in their life. Campers plan their day and track their goals in a Behavior Planning Journal (BPJ). Campers leave with the skill of being able to self-regulate their habits, and with the knowledge of why screen overuse or certain types of media can be damaging.
The Summerland Difference
One of the main differences between Summerland and other behavior change programs is our positive and motivating outlook on the transformation process. We don’t see your child as broken- they simply have fallen into some poor habits and behavioral patterns and need the guidance, skills, and motivation to break these habits in practice new behaviors in their place.
The Solution for Gaming Addiction and Media Overuse
At Summerland, we believe that the solution to changing screen overuse habits is to apply a similar methodology used by psychologists to change other habits including smoking, overeating, and a wide array of other behaviors. Everything we do is based on “best practices” for habit reversal. We use peer-reviewed scientific research to develop our clinical curriculum and our overall approach. Our behavioral coaches at camp take a coaching viewpoint on the problem. We are changing habits and behaviors just like a coach would with a professional athlete. This way we say positive in our approach.
Our philosophy is that changing behavior can be fun! We believe it’s much more effective to have a change bubble up from within, not to be hammered down from above.
We also believe that a multi-modal approach works best, and scientific research on outcomes of behavioral programs supports this notion. What that means on a practical level is that we do many things simultaneously, such as providing training on goal setting, providing education and discussion groups, and introducing campers to other activities. The parental component is also invaluable to produce positive outcomes, and we know through scientific research how important this piece can be.
What Parents Can Do
Parents play a critical role in the change process. Parental involvement has been correlated with positive outcomes of other behaviorally based programs. We provide workshops for parents where they get the knowledge, training, and support to help their camper be successful back home.
We will provide behavioral contracts for parents to use in order to best support their camper. We will also role-play and problem-solve with you in order to find solutions to ongoing family conflicts over screen use.
Gaming Addiction Treatment Versus Other Digital Media
It’s important to understand that the overuse of all digital media is not the same. Consider for a moment someone who binge-watches episodes on Netflix all day versus someone who plays Xbox for hours and hours. Different parts of the brain are activated with each activity. The gamer is receiving much higher levels of stimulation than the TV watcher. Add to this the notion of a social context, such as with Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.
We also look at the co-occurring issues that often go along with digital media overuse. For example, social skill-building opportunities may have fallen off due to the time spent online, especially with gaming addiction treatment. We also get the camper who has problems with frustration tolerance as well. At camp, we have therapy opportunities to correct all of these issues in both group and individual formats.