Free summer camp helps close the gap in healthy behaviors for kids, study finds

Researchers from the Arnold Healthy Kids Initiative and Research Center for Child Well-Being have continued publishing results from their three-year study examining the health effects of providing free summer camp for children from low-income households. In a paper that appeared in JAMA Pediatrics, the team previously showed that free summer programming reduced BMI gains. Specifically, children who attended the free camp decreased their BMI while children who experienced a typical summer saw increases.

In a recently updated article published in The International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, their analysis revealed that the positive impacts of camp participation extended to health promoting behaviors such as increased physical activity and reduced sedentary and screen time. Collectively, these outcomes provide evidence for the use of free summer care to promote health equity among children from different socio-economic groups.

“These findings have important implications for leveraging structured settings to address unhealthy behavior change, and potentially excessive weight gain, during the summer,” says Michael Beets, a professor in the Arnold School’s Department of Exercise Science. “Our research demonstrates that accessing readily available summer day camps within a local community can serve as a viable solution to address the decline in health behaviors observed during summer.”

Decades of prior research have shown that children are at risk for health regressions and unhealthy behaviors during summer vacation. In fact, youth gain more weight relative to height during June, July and August than during the rest of the school year altogether.

To help explain this phenomenon, USC researchers have developed the Structured Days Hypothesis, proposing that organized daily activities promote healthy behaviors (e.g., more opportunities for physical activity, snacks and meals that offer higher nutritional value or are at least calorically capped) while reducing unhealthy behaviors, such as sedentary time or time spent using televisions or handheld screens. Unstructured days, like the open-ended, often unsupervised time many children experience during summer vacation, have the opposite effect.

Beets and many others at the Arnold School and across the university have conducted numerous studies to combat the “summer slide” and prevent childhood obesity in general. Leveraging the structures offered by school, after school programming, and summer camps, they have designed physical activity and nutrition interventions, examined sleeping patterns and government assistance programs, developed novel activity trackers specifically for children, and much more.

While they have seen promising results from these endeavors, widespread, population-level impact can be thwarted by a lack of sustainability in low-resource communities and limited access among low-income households. With this study, they focused on access to existing programs – without the added benefit of their carefully designed interventions – to determine whether simply attending summer care programs, as opposed to unstructured time at home, could improve health to some degree.

By randomly assigning more than 400 children to receive 8-10 weeks of free summer day camp already offered in their local areas or continue summer as normal, the researchers were able to compare an array of health behaviors and metrics. Not only did they find that children who attended the free camp had better outcomes, they also found that the more days they attended, the better those health outcomes were. This held true for BMI, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, sedentary time, and screen time.

“More than 20,000 summer day camps are already serving more than 12 million youth across the U.S., and national surveys indicate that even more parents want their children to participate in these programs,” Beets says. “Public funding to provide universal access to existing, community-based summer camps is one way we can take immediate action to improve health for children nationwide and promote health equity for those in low-income households.”