All Boys, All Girls or All Mixed up?
Pros and Cons of Coed & Single Sex Camps

By Karen Haywood Queen

Let’s play ball - girls against ..... the girls? That’s the way it goes at single sex summer camps - at least the ones for girls only. As parents and children choose a summer camp, that’s one more decision to make: do you want a coed camp or a single sex camp?

Single sex camps and coed camps each offer advantages. But the evolution in camping has been toward coed camps, says Jeff Solomon, executive director of the National Camp Association.

“The stronghold of single sex camps is in the New England area,” Solomon says. That’s where summer camping began –or so they claim around campfires at New England camps.

Of course, there are Girl Scout and Boy Scout camps across the country and those also remain single sex. “Our charters and bylaws say we don’t camp young ladies with Boy Scouts,” says Bill Givler, program director of the Heart of Virginia Council of Boy Scouts of America.

“The boys get focused on the material they’re dealing with,” Givler says.

“A Boy Scout camp is sort of a macho guy thing anyway, the male association,  building an all male team.”

The basic unit of a Boy Scout troop is a patrol where the boys rotate duties every day. But even in countries where troops are coed, the patrols are still all girls or all boys, Givler says. The team building aspect just works better in single sex form

At one time, sports teams worked better in single sex camps, especially for girls. Ten or 20 years ago, girls in a coed camp might find themselves getting the short end of the softball bat.

“Now there’s an understanding - girls aren’t just about arts and crafts,” Solomon says. “Girls in coed camps don’t get treated as second class citizens now when it comes to sports and ball fields.”

Some parents may worry that their girls at a coed camp may spend more time in front of the mirror instead of being themselves and enjoying themselves, Solomon says. “Perhaps in some situations that may occur, but in a coed school, that’s the natural way of interacting anyway,” he says.

“If you have a girl who is intimidated in a coed environment, who hasn’t had the opportunities to take leadership, then taking the male aspect out of it can give the girls the advantage of having the opportunity to compete and be a leader where there are no boys involved,” says Diane Tyrrell, a camp director in Virginia. She also has been involved with Girl Scout camps. “Kids do act differently (around the opposite sex).”

That can be true for boys too.

“I had the occasion to take my (then) 15-year-old daughter to camp out there with all these boys and she disrupts camp,” says Givler of the Boy Scouts.

Even coed camps vary as to how integrated they are.

Parents could choose a brother sister camps where two single sex camps have a limited amount of interaction - for example at a few social events.

Other camps are single sex for most activities, then coed at mealtimes.

Camp Friendship offers a little more interaction – the junior campers live in cabins in single sex “villages.” Tyrell says. The seniors, those 13 and older, still live in single sex cabins of course, but each village is coed and thus offers more interaction.

For people whose children include both girls and boys, a coed camp can make the experience a lot easier, say Tyrell and Solomon.        

“You’re not trying to send your kids and get them to two different places,”

Tyrell says. “Also, if you have multiple children of different ages, one kid could come to two weeks while your other kid is here for five weeks. It’s a nice flexible package we can offer.”

Coed camps offer social aspects for kids - getting along with the opposite sex in a safe environment.

“They get an opportunity for some of that kind of social interaction but it’s supervised,” Tyrell says. “For the younger kids, it’s more of an opportunity to play, to learn to get along. For the teen-agers, there’s definitely an incentive to come to the camp because it’s coed. Our campers don’t date. You may ask a girl to dance to dance at the dance, but if she says no, it’s not a socially crushing atmosphere like a school would be.”

One thing to remember, Tyrell says, the real world is coed.  “At some point in time, you have to learn to get along with members of the opposite sex, learn how to get along, how to negotiate, how to handle those things. It’s more of a realistic experience.”

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