If camps do close down for the entire season, that means parents are left with a major dilemma: how will they fill their children's time for seven weeks this summer?
Millions of kids look forward to sleepaway camp every summer, but now the American pastime is being threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Inside Edition caught up with six families who are anxiously waiting to hear if camp is canceled.
"To run around outside all day with their friends, it's just priceless," said mom Lesley Neadel. "And to not have that is breaking my heart, potentially."
It's not just the kids who look forward to camp every summer. "Last summer was the first summer for all of them to be away, and it was really nice for my husband and I," said mom Emily Rappaport. "We got to travel, we got to have some time to remember what it's like to be just the two of us."
If camps do close down for the entire season, that means parents are left with a major dilemma: how will they fill their children's time for seven weeks this summer?
"We have to come up with some particular structure to keep our kids busy and for those of us that work, which we all do here, it's near impossible to think of what that routine is going to look like," said mom Jennifer Camhi.
Camp expert and Summer365 CEO Lauren Nearpass says camps could actually be a safe haven during the pandemic.
"At sleepaway camp, the beauty of that is it can be this self-contained environment where you can limit the coming and going," Nearpass said. "Hopefully it will prove that it could be, potentially, the safest place for kids to be."
But the concern is understandable — the kids live in close quarters and eat shoulder-to-shoulder.
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