Why We Don’t Do Screens: And Why That Matters More Than Ever
I grew up inside Jameson Ranch Camp. I watched my family build it each spring and take it apart each fall. I watched the atmosphere arrive with the first session and leave with the last van down the mountain. By the time I was old enough to understand what I was seeing, I understood something most people never get to observe: camp is something you construct, every year, out of intention and conviction and real children. Every summer is different. Every summer is the best one yet. That’s not a contradiction; that’s what happens when you build something real.
For more than ninety years and over twenty-five of my own years as director, we have raised children without screens. Not because we’re stuck in the past. Because we’ve watched what happens when children are set free in the real world, and we know, deeply and specifically, that it works.
The Phone Stays in the Car
When your family arrives on opening day, the phone stays in your vehicle. It goes home with you. It doesn’t come through our gate. No exceptions, no negotiated screen breaks, no “just to check in.” The message to your child is unambiguous: for the next two weeks, you are here, fully.
And because every camper follows the same policy, the social pressure disappears. There’s no one scrolling in a corner. Everyone is in the same world, this one, the real one, together. I watch the transition every session: the slight restlessness on the first afternoon, hands reaching toward a pocket out of habit. And then the second morning, when they’re already charging out of their sleeping areas to check on the animals before breakfast. The speed of that shift still astonishes me.
What fills the space is extraordinary. Your child’s day is filled with gathering eggs, riding horses through hundreds of acres of Sierra backcountry, biking up actual mountains, casting for catfish, sleeping under the stars, singing around a campfire, and sitting next to someone new at a table where the bread was baked in an outdoor wood-fired oven using wood they helped split that morning. That isn’t a curated Instagram moment. That’s a Tuesday.
The Research Now Confirms What Camp Families Already Know
Two of the most important voices in psychology right now are saying the same thing, from different angles, and what they’re saying is something JRC families have lived for years.
Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, was among the first researchers to identify what was happening. In her book iGen and in a body of peer-reviewed research spanning over 190 publications, Dr. Twenge documented a sharp inflection point beginning in 2013: rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm among adolescents began climbing at a pace she described as unlike anything she had seen in decades of studying generational data. Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked. Major depressive episodes increased by 50 percent in just a few years. Her research on a sample of over 40,000 children found that heavy screen users were twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety as light users, and the increases were most pronounced among girls and young women. What changed in 2013? The smartphone had reached saturation among American teenagers, and social media platforms had become the architecture of their social lives.
Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU and author of The Anxious Generation, which has spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list, built on Twenge’s data to name the broader developmental crisis. He calls it the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood: children who once spent their free time outdoors, navigating social situations face-to-face, testing limits, and learning to manage risk now spend it on devices engineered to capture and hold their attention. That shift, Haidt argues, is not merely cultural. It is neurodevelopmental. And it has produced an international epidemic of anxiety, depression, and diminished resilience that crosses borders and socioeconomic lines.
But here’s the part that should give every parent hope: the effects are reversible. A UCLA study showed that just five days at a tech-free camp significantly improved children’s ability to read nonverbal emotional cues. The American Camp Association’s five-year National Camp Impact Study found that 58 percent of youth reported that camp helped them appreciate being present, away from technology, building real relationships, reducing distractions. Twenge herself has noted that the problem isn’t screens in moderation, it’s the displacement of everything else. When a phone fills the hours that used to belong to play, sleep, and in-person friendship, children suffer. Remove the phone, restore those hours, and children recover. Five days is what the UCLA study measured. We give your child fourteen.
Every Child Is Different. Every Child Is at Risk.
I don’t say that to be alarmist. I say it because it’s what the research shows and what I see every spring when parents call: She won’t look at us during dinner. He’s angry all the time. She used to love being outside. He doesn’t seem to have any real friends. Every child who walks through our gate is carrying something. And every child has the capacity to surprise themselves here, if we build the right conditions. That’s my job. I take it seriously.
Children are antifragile; they don’t just tolerate challenge, they need it in order to grow. Smartphones short-circuit that process by offering an instant escape from boredom, discomfort, and the productive awkwardness of meeting new people. At JRC, we remove the escape hatch. Your child chooses their own activities, puts food on their own plate, contributes to a working ranch community, and takes real, supervised risks. They discover they are braver and more capable than they thought. I have staked my career on the conviction that what happens on this ranch is one of the best answers available to what is ailing children right now.
An Invitation
I know that driving away with your child’s phone in your glovebox requires trust. You’re trusting me with their safety, their social world, their emotional experience. I don’t take that lightly. I never have. Our staff is carefully selected and extensively trained. Our communication with parents is the kind that actually works: letters, phone calls when needed, and the knowledge that your child is in a community that has been nurturing young people since 1934. I grew up in that community. I stake my family’s name on it every summer.
If you sense that something is wrong, that the devices designed to connect your child to the world are actually disconnecting them from it, you are not alone. The research now firmly supports what your instincts have been telling you. And a place already exists where your child can remember who they are without a screen in their hand. It smells like pine trees and campfire smoke and horse leather and fresh bread. It sounds like crickets and guitar strings and children laughing.
Every child who comes here is different. Every summer I build is different. And every summer is the best one yet—because the children who show up are the children who need it, and this ranch rises to meet them.
Come home to JRC. Let your child look up.
Erica Jameson
Camp Director · Third-Generation Steward · www.jamesonranchcamp.com