5 Lessons from Taking My Kids Camping

Antibiotics, good shoes, and bug spray are must-haves.

Last weekend, I took my two boys camping with a group of men from our church. It was my 5-year-old’s first time sleeping outside, and my 10-year-old’s first time camping away from our 5-acre property.

If you have kids, you should definitely take them camping. It’s fun, of course, but it’s also a tremendous opportunity to help them learn to be resilient, to make do with what’s on hand, and to learn hard lessons that they can’t learn from a book.

Likewise, it’s also a great way to help make you, the parent, more resilient, especially if you’re not used to dealing with the challenges of the outdoors combined with the challenges of wrangling children. Marching out into the woods by yourself and eating beans under a tree is pretty easy. Add in the chaos that children bring and things get a lot more interesting.

Here are 5 lessons I learned on this trip. They’re all pretty common sense, but it’s all the more reason you have to get out and get experience in the real world.

Some camping companions.

The Go-Bag Concept Is Laughable

For the past couple of years, I’ve been wanting to write a post about rethinking the bug-out bag, and I think the time has about come. It’s not that I think having a handy bag of gear is a bad idea—far from it—but the concept that the average person can have everything they need on their back to march out into the woods and survive for a week is borderline fantasy. Add kids to the mix and it’s outright hysterical.