The Research Caught Up to What We Already Knew

There’s a question I get asked more than almost any other: “How do you handle the no-phones thing?” Parents ask with genuine curiosity, sometimes with anxiety, and occasionally with disbelief. They want to know how we enforce it. What happens when a thirteen-year-old goes two weeks without a screen for the first time?

I understand the question. But every time I hear it, I want to reframe the entire conversation. Because we don’t “handle” screen-free at JRC. We don’t enforce it like a homework policy. Being screen-free is not something we do to campers. It’s the world we live in. It’s been the world we’ve lived in since my grandparents opened this ranch to children in 1934.

JRC didn’t become screen-free in response to smartphones. We didn’t read a bestseller and overhaul our program. We were screen-free before there were screens to be free of. And that distinction matters more than you might think.

We Were Here Before the Screens

When my grandparents started hosting children on this ranch in the Southern Sierra Nevada, the idea of a summer camp wasn’t built around what kids should avoid. It was built around what kids should experience. Sunshine on your face at 6:45 in the morning when you roll out of your sleeping bag to feed the animals. The sound of Bonah Creek running through camp. The particular satisfaction of gathering wood for the outdoor oven and knowing that the bread your whole community eats at dinner came, in part, from your hands.

Our mission—to make the world a better place, one summer at a time—has never been a reaction against technology. It’s a statement about what we believe childhood requires: the chance to live close to the earth, to work alongside others in a self-sustaining community, to take acceptable risks, to sit with boredom until it becomes curiosity, and to discover that you are more capable than you ever imagined.

That hasn’t changed in nine decades. Not because we’re stubborn. Because it works.

What Screen-Free Actually Looks Like on a Working Ranch

Let me paint the picture, because what people imagine when they hear “screen-free camp” is not what we are. They imagine a conventional camp that has removed technology and replaced it with something else. More structured activities, perhaps. A clipboard full of rules about where you can and can’t have your phone.

That’s not JRC. We are a working ranch at 5,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada. There is no cell service. There is no Wi-Fi. Our bathrooms are outhouses. Our showers are solar-heated and open to the sky. Everyone—every camper, every counselor, every member of my family—sleeps outside on sleeping porches. There are roofs, but there are no walls. You fall asleep looking at stars and wake up to birdsong and the particular quality of Sierra morning light filtering through the oaks.

In this environment, you don’t “remove” screens. There’s simply nothing to remove. The question of technology doesn’t arise because the world we’ve built is so full of real things—horses to ride, rocks to climb, gardens to tend, fish to catch, bread to bake, songs to sing, friends to make—that the absence of a screen isn’t an absence at all. It’s a presence. The presence of everything else.

Simplicity Is a Philosophy, Not a Restriction

One of the five pillars that guide everything we do at JRC is Simplicity. Our camp thrives in a natural environment, free from the distractions of technology and urban life. This setting allows campers to connect more deeply with others and with themselves, fostering a sense of presence and active participation in the moment.

It doesn’t say “we ban phones because phones are bad.” It says we operate in a setting where deeper connection is possible precisely because distraction has been removed. One framing is punitive. The other is invitational.

When I was a child growing up on this ranch, simplicity wasn’t a branding concept. It was just the way things were. Our pace of life was connected with the sunshine of each day. We grew our own food, tended our own animals, built our own structures. That’s still true today. Every child who comes to JRC has a daily chore—garden crew, barn chores, feeding chickens, tending the small animals. They pick their job on Sunday and they do it every morning that week.

In today’s world, where children can go entire seasons without ever contributing tangibly to the functioning of their own household, this is quietly radical. A six-year-old who feeds chickens every morning before breakfast starts to understand something about responsibility that no app can teach. A twelve-year-old who spends a work crew afternoon fixing fences alongside staff carries that experience in their body, not just their mind.