The latest Camp Akeela newsletter is here!

Check Out The Spring 2026 Newsletter

As we finish up with the camp forms for our younger daughter, who will be going to her 7-week sleepaway camp for her 5th time this summer, we want to acknowledge that sending your child away to camp is a lot of work. Of course, there are the doctors’ appointments, the prescriptions that need to be called in, the shopping, packing and organizing. And, we can’t underestimate the emotional work that goes into it!

Preparing your child for camp takes time and energy – a positive energy. Pushing through our own fears and worries about sending our camper away needs to be a priority so we can meet our child with a “clean slate”. Our children need to feel our optimism and confidence that going to camp will be a life-changing experience – one that will enable them to become more independent and more confident, and an experience that will lead to meaningful friendships that will last a long time. All of our campers are intuitive and if they sense that we’re afraid about this very big transition, they will take on that worry themselves.

Some advice for those of you who are worried about camp this summer:

• Write down your concerns! Take some time during the day (not right before bed or you’ll never be able to fall asleep!) to jot down your worries. That act of acknowledgment is important, and then you can revisit each concern and decide to either address it, or let it go!
• Call us. We’re here to help and sometimes more information is all we need to minimize our fears.
• Breathe! Go for a walk or take 10 minutes with a cup of tea to just relax.
• Read Homesick and Happy by Michael Thompson. It’s a really great book that will help remind you what an amazing gift you’re giving your child by giving them a sleepaway camp experience.

By the way, much of this advice will work great for your anxious camper, too.

Your camper’s Head Counselor will be emailing you prior to your camper’s session to chat about anything that’s on your mind so feel free to start a list now that you communicate with them about once our team is all up in VT after June 13th. Enjoy the rest of spring and we’ll see you soon!

— Debbie and Eric

In this edition of the Akeela newsletter, you’ll also find:

• What to Expect On the First Day of Camp
• Meet David, Our New Associate Director
• From The Blog: D&D As an Executive Function Workout
• A Note About Bunk Counselors Assignments
• Our Annual Geography Update: Where Akeela Campers & Staff Come From
• 2026 Special Events & Theme Days
• Welcome New Campers!

Read the entire Spring 2026 Newsletter here!

Why a buzzword of 2026 actually describes what great overnight camps have been doing for kids – especially neurodivergent ones – all along.

Earlier this year, a piece in New York Magazine’s The Cut made the rounds online. It was written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton, and it introduced a phrase that seemed to stick with a lot of exhausted, screen-weary parents: friction-maxxing.

The concept is straightforward, if a little uncomfortable. Technology companies, Jezer-Morton argues, have spent years engineering our lives to be frictionless. No waiting, no awkward pauses, every inconvenience smoothed away . Everything is more convenient and algorithms know exactly what to offer next. The result is that we’ve lost our tolerance for the normal challenges of being human. Things like being bored, or figuring out a social situation, or doing a task slowly and imperfectly.

Friction-maxxing is the proposed antidote. It’s choosing the harder option on purpose. Reading a real book instead of watching a recap. Calling your mom instead of texting. Letting your kid be bored for a bit instead of handing them a screen.

When we first read the piece here in the Akeela office, the reaction was something like: yes – and also, we’ve been doing this for decades.

What Camp Directors Have Always Known

The friction-maxxing conversation is new, but the idea isn’t.

If you’ve worked at a camp long enough, you know that the harder moments are usually the important ones. Friction isn’t exactly fun in-the-moment, necessarily, but it’s important. A kid lying in their bunk on the first night, feeling homesick and having to get through it without calling home. A disagreement with a bunkmate that can’t be solved by blocking them online. Trying to climb the rock wall and losing your cool at the 3-feet mark.

Those moments can be uncomfortable. Sometimes really uncomfortable. But they matter.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about this in his book (and one of our favorites to recommend!) The Anxious Generation. His point, more or less, is that kids need some level of challenge in order to grow. Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs, and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance.

In a section of his book dedicated to solutions, Haidt specifically called out overnight summer camp — away from devices, full of communal responsibility, slightly risky, exciting, and full of the real human friction that screens have been engineered to eliminate — as one of the most powerful environments for children’s development. Camp professionals have known this for generations, and Haidt and Jezer-Morton have simply given us some catchy vocabulary to help the world understand it.

The Specific Frictions of Overnight Camp

It’s worth pausing to name what “friction” actually looks like at an overnight summer camp, because it’s not one big dramatic challenge. It’s dozens of small ones, every single day.

Waking up, getting yourself ready in the morning, and making your bed (or at least attempting to). Navigation family-style meals and figuring out what you want to eat, and should you try to make a healthy choice? Trying an activity you’ve never done before, in front of other people. Asking for help.

Also just … managing your own stuff. Your schedule, your emotions, your choices. There’s support, obviously, but no one is doing it all for you.

None of these are traumatic. But each one is practice. And practice, repeated across three weeks of immersive community life, builds something that can’t be built through a worksheet or a social skills group: genuine, internalized capability. The friction is the mechanism of growth, not the obstacle to it.

Why This Matters Even More for Neurodivergent Kids

This kind of experience is good for any kid. For neurodivergent kids – those with ASD1, ADHD, twice-exceptional profiles, or similar – it may be more important still. Here’s why:

The frictionless world that Jezer-Morton and Haidt are writing about was not designed with neurodivergent brains in mind. But, in some ways, the conveniences of technology feel tailor-made to compensate for executive function challenges. For neurodivergent kids who genuinely struggle with planning, organization, and self-regulation, these tools can feel like a lifeline.

But there’s a tradeoff. When everything is handled for you, you don’t get as many chances to build those underlying skills yourself. And for neurodivergent kids who will one day navigate college applications, job interviews, roommate conflicts, and adult friendships (without an algorithm to smooth the way) those underlying skills are not optional.

Those abilities develop through experience. Through trying, messing up, adjusting, trying again. Camp gives kids a place to do that, with support, but without removing the challenge entirely.

The Difference Between Struggle and Suffering

A note worth making explicit: friction-maxxing is not about making children suffer. Jezer-Morton made this clear in her original piece, and it bears repeating in the context of neurodivergent kids, for whom school and social life have often already delivered more than their share of genuine pain.
Good camp programs are thoughtful about this. The expectation isn’t perfection, it’s effort. Kids are asked to stretch, but they’re also supported. Staff are paying attention. There’s a balance.

At Camp Akeela, we think carefully about what kind of friction we’re introducing. We design for the productive kind. The kind that asks a camper to stretch a little, try something new, work through something uncomfortable — and feel the genuine satisfaction of having done it.

The goal isn’t to eliminate discomfort completely. It’s to help kids realize they can handle it. That there’s something on the other side worth having.

What Three Weeks Can Do

Three weeks of camp is hundreds of small frictions — social, emotional, practical, physical — navigated in a supported community of peers who share your neurotype.

These moments accumulate. The kid who arrives uncertain about whether they fit in discovers something different. They discover they are capable. That they are good company. That hard things, in the company of people who are rooting for you, are not quite as hard as they seemed.

That’s the friction-maxxing promise. Camp has been delivering it all along.

Parents of kids with ADHD or ASD are very familiar with the phrase executive function. It refers to a cluster of cognitive skills — working memory, impulse control, planning, organization, cognitive flexibility, emotional regulation — that some neurodivergent brains find more challenging. These are also, not coincidentally, skills that – when still developing – can make school and social life hard.

Here’s what most people don’t know: playing D&D is an intensive exercise in exactly these skills. And because it doesn’t feel like a skill-building exercise — because it feels like an adventure — kids practice without resistance.

Keeping track of hit points, planning strategies in combat, and resolving conflicts require players to exercise cognitive functions such as working memory and impulse control. The failures and setbacks kids experience in the course of a D&D game can be valuable practice for real life. D&D provides a low-stakes, high-engagement arena for exactly that practice.

The planning dimension is equally rich. Before a session, players manage their character’s inventory, track ongoing quests, and strategize for upcoming encounters. During play, they constantly update their understanding of the situation, regulate their impulses (no, your character can’t just attack the shopkeeper), and coordinate with others toward shared goals. Again: executive function training.

For twice-exceptional kids — those who are intellectually gifted but who face significant challenges in areas like attention, organization, or social cognition — D&D can be particularly well-matched. The game rewards deep, creative, system-level thinking. That’s where 2e kids often shine. At the same time, the collaborative structure gently requires the interpersonal skills they may find harder to access.

A Safe Space to Practice the Hard Stuff

One of the most consistent findings across D&D research is how the game creates a uniquely safe environment for trying things that feel risky in real life. Social risk-taking — speaking up, advocating for yourself, navigating conflict, leading a group — is genuinely frightening for many neurodivergent kids. The fear of getting it wrong, of being embarrassed, of saying the wrong thing and having peers remember it, is real and well-founded.

D&D reduces that fear in a fundamental way: the stakes belong to the character, not the player.

If your paladin makes a bold argument and fails to persuade the innkeeper, that’s the paladin’s problem. If your ranger steps up to lead the group through the forest and takes a wrong turn, the party adapts and moves on. The mistakes are in the story. The learning, though, is very much in the player.

The safe space lets players process real-world challenges through fantasy scenarios, including facing fears and standing up to a bully. Gamers who are neurodivergent may find D&D to be an outlet where they can explore their interests and express their unique perspectives — but still feel in control.

What Happens Around the Table

There is research that backs this up. One of the most widely cited early clinical applications of D&D with neurodivergent youth involved a small group of boys with ADHD and related challenges who participated in a therapist-run D&D campaign over an extended period. Following the intervention, school and home reporting showed that all four of the boys were far less impulsive and their social functioning had improved significantly. The cooperation required to overcome the obstacles put in place by the therapist — who took on the role of Game Master — resulted in the boys spending longer amounts of time engaged in conversation, planning manoeuvres, and cooperating. Each demonstrated increasing confidence in leading the group and problem-solving, skills which transferred into home and school life. Teachers reported improvements in classroom behavior and grades. The skills — the planning, the impulse regulation, the collaborative problem-solving — didn’t stay at the table.

This is what we see at Camp Akeela, too. The camper who sits down at the D&D table for the first time, tentative and unsure, watching the more experienced players with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety. A few sessions later, that same kid is debating strategy, making others laugh with an unexpected character choice, and building the kind of in-joke history with their party that is the raw material of real friendship.

What to Expect if Your Child Has Never Played

One of the beauties of D&D for new players — especially anxious or uncertain ones — is that the barrier to entry is low and the on-ramp is forgiving. You don’t need to know the rules to start. You don’t need to be a “gamer.” You need imagination and a willingness to engage.

At Camp Akeela, our D&D groups are run by experienced, trained staff who know how to support neurodivergent players through the learning curve, accommodate different styles of engagement, and ensure that every player — not just the most confident or extroverted ones — has meaningful moments at the table.

Some kids arrive at camp having played D&D for years. Some have never rolled a d20 in their lives. It doesn’t matter. Within a session or two, newcomers find their footing, make choices that matter to the story, and begin to feel the particular satisfaction of a game that rewards creativity, persistence, and teamwork.

Why Camp Is the Perfect Place for This

There’s D&D you can play on a Tuesday evening at home, in a local after-school program, or online. And all of those are valuable. But there’s something about playing D&D at overnight summer camp that amplifies everything we’ve described.

The friendships that form around the table at camp are embedded in a larger community. The party who defeated the dragon together at 4pm is also hanging out after dinner or at snack the next day. That continuity — the chance to know and be known by the same group of peers across weeks, not just hours — is what turns D&D connections into genuine friendships.

Many of our campers are particularly well suited for the game. The deep knowledge and intense curiosity that can make them feel like they don’t always fit in at school makes them an incredible world-builder at the D&D table. Their creative, associative thinking often generates the most memorable moments in the campaign.
At the D&D table, the neurodivergent brain isn’t a limitation. It’s a superpower. And that’s the kind of confidence that travels home from camp and keeps going.

Dungeons & Dragons is a permanent and beloved part of life at Camp Akeela, and we’ve embraced it enthusiastically because it aligns so well with everything we’re here to do: help neurodivergent kids discover what they’re capable of, build real friendships with peers who get them, and leave the summer knowing themselves a little better than when they arrived.

Every June, something remarkable happens at camps like ours. A kid who has spent the entire school year masking — carefully performing a version of themselves that fits into a neurotypical world — arrives at camp and, within a day or two, exhales. They meet another kid who also loves deep-diving into obscure topics. They find a bunkmate who understands what it’s like to need a few minutes of quiet before dinner. They discover that the social rules here are different — kinder, more flexible, built for the way they actually think.

For many of our campers, it’s the first time they’ve felt genuinely at ease around their peers.

If you’re the parent of a neurodivergent child — whether they’ve been diagnosed with ASD Level 1 (formerly known as Asperger’s syndrome), ADD or ADHD, NVLD, or have what’s sometimes called a “twice-exceptional” profile — you probably know exactly what that constant performance costs your kid. The exhaustion at the end of a school day. The social missteps that sting for days. The loneliness that can quietly accumulate when you never quite feel like you belong.
Overnight summer camp, the right overnight summer camp, can change all of that.

The Science of Belonging — and Why It Matters So Much

Researchers have spent years studying what helps neurodivergent young people thrive, and one finding keeps emerging: belonging is not a nice-to-have. It’s protective. A major 2024 scoping review published in Research in Developmental Disabilities found that a sense of belonging was one of the most consistent resilience factors for autistic youth and those with ADHD — buffering against anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal. Peer acceptance, in particular, was found to be protective specifically for children with ADHD in ways it wasn’t for neurotypical peers.

What this research underscores is something that experienced camp directors have observed for decades: neurodivergent kids often aren’t struggling because something is wrong with them. They’re struggling because their environment doesn’t fit them. When you change the environment — when you place them in a community full of kids who share their neurotype, their humor, their intensity, their quirks — the outcomes can be profound.

A recent study published in the journal Autism that followed autistic individuals across childhood into adulthood found that one of the most significant predictors of adult wellbeing was whether someone had found genuine community with others who “got” them. Participants who eventually connected with their neurodivergent peers described the experience in striking terms: finally feeling understood, finally being able to drop the performance, finally being able to form real friendships.
Camp can be where that happens first.

The Exhausting Work of “Masking” — and What Happens When Kids Can Stop

You may have heard the term “masking” — the strategy many autistic and ADHD kids use to suppress or hide their natural behaviors in order to fit in. Research published in 2025 in School Mental Health found that autistic adolescents who mask most heavily are also the ones most likely to report a profound lack of belonging, feelings of personal failure, and low self-worth. The mask works, in a narrow sense: it reduces social friction. But it comes at a steep cost to identity and mental health.
What’s striking about a well-designed neurodivergent summer camp is that kids don’t need the mask. There’s no social incentive to perform neurotypicality when everyone around you is, in some sense, wired the same way. Special interests aren’t embarrassing — they’re conversation starters. Needing a few minutes of downtime isn’t a weakness — it’s normal. The kid who wants to spend an entire free period explaining the history of a particular video game franchise, or the one who has memorized the migratory patterns of every bird in Vermont, finds their people here.

Dr. Emily King, a child psychologist who specializes in neurodivergent youth, has written about why summer camp is particularly powerful for kids who find school exhausting: school asks them to constantly engage with things they don’t find interesting while managing sensory environments and social expectations that weren’t designed for them. Camp flips the equation. The activities are engaging. The social structure is more forgiving. The whole point is fun — and through that fun, social skills develop naturally and organically.

More Than Social Skills: What Camp Actually Builds

We don’t think of Akeela as “social skills training”. That just wouldn’t be the right term for kids who are perfectly capable of deep, meaningful connection — they just need the right context for it.

What a good overnight camp for neurodivergent kids actually builds isn’t a checklist of social behaviors. It’s something harder to quantify and more important: confidence in one’s own identity.

When a camper discovers that their intense curiosity is an asset, not an oddity — that other kids find it cool that they know everything about Roman aqueducts or competitive Pokémon — something shifts. When they navigate a conflict with a bunkmate and come out the other side of it with the relationship intact, they carry that forward. When they try something new and succeed — a ropes course, a theatrical performance, a new friendship — they accumulate evidence that contradicts the story many of them have internalized: I’m bad at this. I’m too much. I don’t fit.

The overnight component of camp matters especially here. A day program ends at three o’clock. An overnight camp means your child is navigating real life — morning routines, shared spaces, meals, bedtime, all of it — in a community of peers. The skills that develop in that immersive, 24/7 context are different from anything a weekly social skills group can provide. They’re learned in context, through genuine relationships, with the kind of repetition that actually sticks.
Parents who’ve sent their kids to specialized overnight camps often describe the same phenomenon: their child comes home different. Taller, somehow. More confident. More willing to advocate for themselves. Having made, in many cases, friendships that have lasted for years.

“Is My Child Ready For Camp?”

This is the question we hear most often from parents, and it’s a great one. Sending any child away for the summer requires trust. Sending a neurodivergent child, one who may have had painful social experiences or who struggles with transitions, requires even more.

A few things to note:

• The right camp is built for your child’s profile. At a specialized camp like ours, the structure, the staffing ratios, the activity design, and the community norms are all oriented around the kids we serve. Staff are trained to recognize and support neurodivergent campers — not to push them toward neurotypical behavior, but to help them thrive as they are.
• Discomfort is not failure. Camp will have hard moments. Homesickness is real. Some social situations won’t go perfectly. But as child psychologist and camp expert Audrey Monke — author of Happy Campers — has noted, those moments of discomfort are often where the most meaningful growth happens. As parents, one of the hardest and most important things we can do is let our kids work through difficulty rather than shield them from it. The confidence they develop on the other side of a hard moment is genuinely their own.
• The community matters as much as the programming. What makes specialized overnight camps different isn’t just the activities — it’s who’s there. Your child will be surrounded by peers who share their neurotype. For many kids, this is a genuinely new experience: being in the majority, not the minority. Being normal here, for the first time.

The Friendships That Last

We’ve seen it over and over, for nearly two decades of running Camp Akeela: the friendships that form here are not ordinary summer friendships. They’re the kind built on genuine mutual recognition — I see you, and I’m like you — and those tend to hold.

Many of our alumni are still in close contact with their camp friends many years later. Some have gone on to college together. The neurodivergent community, when it finds itself, has a particular cohesion — because the experience of finally being understood is not something people take for granted or forget.

If your child has struggled to form lasting friendships, if they’ve come home from school feeling lonely or misunderstood more times than you can count, if they’ve never quite had their people — camp might be where they find them.

Is Camp Akeela Right for Your Child?

Campers who thrive at Camp Akeela have average to above-average intelligence and a neurodivergent profile that includes some need for social support. Many have been diagnosed with ASD Level 1 (formerly Asperger’s syndrome), ADD or ADHD (particularly inattentive type), NVLD, or a similar profile. Some come without a formal diagnosis but with a learning and social profile that fits our community. What they share is a particular kind of intelligence and creativity — and a wish, often unspoken, to finally have a place where they belong.

Our three-week overnight camp is set on 400 beautiful wooded acres in Vermont, with traditional camp programming that includes aquatics, outdoor adventure, arts, athletics, Dungeons & Dragons, and much more — all within a structure that’s been designed with neurodivergent campers in mind. We also offer Beyond Akeela for older teens (10th–12th grade) who are preparing for the transition to college.

We’d love to talk with you about whether Camp Akeela might be the right fit for your child. The best way to start is simply to reach out and connect with us.
Sometimes the most transformative thing we can do for our kids is give them a summer where they get to be exactly who they are — and discover that who they are is more than enough.

The latest Camp Akeela newsletter is here!

In this addition, you’ll find:

• A note from Akeela’s directors, Debbie and Eric
• Two Spotify playlists: camper favorites from last summer and classic Akeela campfire songs
• An explanation of CampLauncher and the Akeela Launch-A-Thons
• Debbie’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Amazing Generation (see below)
• A recipe for brookies … half brownie, half cookie, totally delicious!
• A hilarious camp-themed Mad Lib

Here is an excerpt of Debbie’s book review:

I’ve been a fan of Jonathan Haidt for a long time. The Coddling of the American Mind (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff) stuck with me in such a profound way. I talk about it all the time with our staff and with colleagues. Last year, I also read The Anxious Generation, Haidt’s much-discussed book about how the use of cell phones and social media have changed an entire generation.

Haidt has written a kids’ book called The Amazing Generation. It was actually co-authored by Catherine Price who wrote How to Break Up with Your Phone (which I loved and reviewed here). Their new book basically boils the Anxious Generation down into fun and easily digested information for kids. Its message is simple: life is way more interesting, creative, and joyful when you look up from a screen. Instead of saying “put the phone away” it invites kids to rediscover how amazing real life can be — friendships, adventures, nature, and all. I highly recommend that you think about ordering it for your younger camper as a holiday gift!

Of course, I particularly loved that Haidt lauds summer camps as examples of spaces where children get a break from screens and are able to experience more meaningful and personal connections! One of the young people highlighted in the text talks about how much she loved being phone-free at summer camp. Needless to say, we couldn’t agree more! As I think specifically about Akeela, I want to recognize that neurodivergent kids often thrive on structure, connection, and hands-on experiences; being without a phone for 3 weeks helps us achieve those goals.

Why unplugging matters:

• It celebrates real connection. The book shows how face-to-face time beats screen time for feeling truly seen and supported.
• It builds confidence. Just like camp, it encourages safe adventures and trying new things.
• It normalizes screen breaks. Instead of feeling like punishment, unplugging becomes an opportunity.
• It supports self-advocacy. The book helps kids understand the “why” behind limits — so they feel empowered, not restricted.