21-07-2025
Life Without Screens: This Camp Is a Teen's Worst Nightmare
Jul 21, 2025 6:00 AM Hidden burner phones. Hunger strikes. Runaways. The director of a digital detox program for kids spills about how hard it is to tear kids away from their devices. PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: JOHANNA GOODMAN; GETTY IMAGES
Summer. For teens not at work, it's hot, it's boring, and it's an ideal time to close the door and spend about every waking moment watching, playing, texting, streaming—anything but talking—on the phone. With almost half of teenagers in the US saying they're online almost constantly, the adults in their lives are growing more desperate to drag them off. Families are establishing screen-free zones in their homes, states are banning phones in schools, and a new kind of summer camp has emerged: digital detox camps, which can cost around $2,000 a week, and promise to wean attendees off screens by going cold turkey for the summer.
WIRED spoke to the founder and director of one such organization. Taking a cue from your average summer camp, the program forces kids to swap their phones and gaming systems for some good old-fashioned social interaction. But in other ways, it's anything but traditional: It's staffed with onsite therapists equipped to handle screen addiction, the kids take financial literacy courses, and nearly all campers are completely miserable when they arrive.
Most of the kids who come to our program are very socially stunted. They don't communicate very well. Everything is in abbreviations. They don't make eye contact. They can't finish a full sentence. Everything is mumbled. They don't want to have an in-person dialog. They would rather do it online or do it through text.
Our camp is about 70 percent boys, 30 percent girls, from ages 13 to 17. Most of the boys are gamers. Most of the girls are addicted to social media—influencer wannabes. None of them want to be there. One kid ran away, and he actually made it down to the freeway, which was very unusual because we're not close to the freeway. He was picked up by the local highway patrol and brought back. He then went on a hunger strike for three days, and we actually ended up sending him to the hospital because he needed to eat. And then his mom did come and pick him up.
When the kids arrive, we have them unpack to make sure they brought everything they were supposed to bring and that they didn't bring things they weren't supposed to bring. Like phones. One kid showed up with three cell phones: When he arrived, he turned in one. We found another cell phone in his bag. And then about three days later his roommate outed him, and we found the third phone. He thought it was funny that he got away with it for that long. That's most of our kids—if they can stick it to the man, then they're winning.
Most of the kids are not aggressive, they're not acting out. More often, they're moping. But once they come out of their dorm room, we lock the doors. I say, 'Sitting in your dorm room moping is not a camp activity.'
Their sleeping and eating habits are horrible. Most kids, especially the online gamers, are up until 2 or 3 in the morning. They don't get up until noon or later. It's a disaster. And their eating habits, they're equally horrible—Doritos and Gatorade, just horrible snack food.
So we have them on a very specific schedule. They're in their dorm rooms by 9:30 and have their lights out by 10. And then we wake them up at 6:30. I always tell my staff, 'Plan on not sleeping much the first week.'
They have one or two roommates in their dorm rooms. Typically, they are not happy about that. Most kids who come to our program have their own room at home. But what's funny is that it creates this us-against-them mentality, because they don't want to be there, and their roommate doesn't want to be there. They hate us, they hate their parents for sending them there, so they kind of bond without meaning to right off the bat.
We do all the traditional summer camp activities. We take them to the beach once a week. It's not that much torture. During one of the first years, we had a kid who walked away from the beach day. And he didn't walk far, but he approached a couple who were taking a selfie and asked if he could use their phone. He ended up calling his mom, saying, 'Get me out of here.' His mom did not come and pick him up: The next year, she sent his little brother to camp too. We had more staff members come to beach day after that.
We also do educational programs and a financial literacy class. We have to break it to these kids that tech companies don't care about their fun and enjoyment; they're after their time and their money. We've had several kids who have been given credit cards that they then charge up, buying in-app activities or 'skins' in games like Fortnite . And then when they can't spend any more on that card, they'll use their friend's card, their mom's card. We had one kid use their friend's grandmother's card. But we never tell a kid, 'Never play a video game again, never be online again, never check your email again.' That's just not the reality of the world we live in.
When we started this program, we didn't really expect to have returning campers. We figured we'd get you cured, and then next summer you go to surf camp or sail camp or horseback camp or something. But every year we have one or two kids who want to come back—not because they've gone back to the dark side of tech addiction; it's because they want to help the next batch of campers. They want to say to a mopey new camper, 'I was you last year. I was exactly where you are, and I turned out OK.'
—As told to Elana Klein
