Melissa Bailey's 11-year-old son, Jake, diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD ADHD) three years ago, does well in school but is often excluded by his classmates. Bailey sent Jake to Camp Northwood, a New York camp designed to help kids like Jake find peers, feel accepted, and increase their confidence. "For the first time he actually made friends. He participated in all sorts of outdoor activities, and came home feeling awesome about himself."

Monica Rappaport found an outdoor adventure camp designed for kids with ADHD and mild to moderate behavior disorders for her 12-year-old son (ADHD and bipolar). He spent 16 days team-building, canoeing, camping, and hiking across northern Michigan and, says Rappaport, "He came back a new person. His self-esteem was the highest I have ever seen it."

Lisa Bernstein chose a mainstream, four-week, overnight camp, but took extra care in packing her ADHD son's bags, listing the contents of each one on an index card. Bernstein also armed the camp staff with suggestions about how to make things go more smoothly. She reports that, although her son "came home with significantly less clothing to unpack, he brought home an abundance of wonderful, happy memories."

At the mention of the words summer camp, questions come to mind for parents of ADDers: Will my child make friends? Who will make sure he takes his medication? How can I make sure he doesn't fall behind academically over the summer? What if he doesn't behave appropriately? Virtually all camps specializing in ADD and LD children share a set of staffing and structural characteristics that address these (and other) parental worries. And these are the areas about which you'll want to ask detailed questions of each camp you consider.

Similarities aside, parents still must choose among a broad range of ADD/LD camps, camps that differ in the activities they offer, their mission, and educational goals. Here, we look at four types of ADD/LD camps. We've asked experts for tips on choosing a camp - and invited readers to share their experiences. It's our hope that this article will be a good place to start. Then, it's up to you to determine what camp best suits your child's needs, your family's schedule, and your budget.

Characteristics of the best ADD/LD camps

The areas outlined below distinguish the best ADD/LD camps from their "mainstream" brethren and, for the most part, should relieve you of your main concerns about sending your child off, away from your parental eye.

• Highly trained staff. ADD/LD camps often employ counselors who are, in fact, trained psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, teachers, or speech and language pathologists. In the best specialized camps, 20 percent or more of a camp's supervisory staff must have a relevant bachelor's degree or at least 24 weeks of experience working with ADD/LD kids. Pat Hammond, director of standards for the American Camp Association (ACA), says, "We want camp staff to be up-to-date in their field, to be able to work effectively and understand the kids they serve."

• Individualized attention. While most mainstream camps have counselor-to-camper ratios ranging from 1:6 to 1:10, ADD/LD camps pride themselves on much more individual attention. Even the camps that serve high-functioning kids often have two or three counselors for every seven to 10 children per cabin. Such a high staff-to-camper ratio allows counselors to build mentor relationships, teach social lessons and life skills in an everyday context, and maintain behavioral standards. In fact, many ADD camps say their large staffs allow for the warmth and sense of community that are the hallmarks of their programs.

• Social skills instruction. While kids with ADD often have average to above-average intelligence, they may need help making friends. Virtually all ADD camps provide social skills training, with a focus on team building. Social skills are integrated into daily activities (e.g., helping one another while navigating a rocky trail, discussing behavior after a soccer game).

As Dave Stoch, director of Camp Kodiak, in Ontario, Canada, says, "We teach social skills all day long in everything we do," to approximate a real-life context. Some camps offer formal social-skills sessions, but counselors are also trained to look for "teachable moments" - instances to reinforce positive behavior or catch and redirect social errors.

• Enhanced medical services. ADD/LD camp directors told ADDitude that as many as 80 percent of their campers are on medications; substantial medical staffs are the norm. Summit Camp, a four-week, therapeutic-recreation camp in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania, has five full-time nurses and a full-time pediatrician on staff. At ADD camps, the logistics of administering medication are in place. While some camps use services such as CampMeds or Meds On Call, to package a child's individual doses, others may train staff or counselors to deliver and track medications throughout the day.

• An educational component. In contrast to mainstream recreational camps, where it is unusual to find campers engaged in formal educational activities, most ADD/LD camps build three to 12 hours of reading, math, or study skills into the weekly schedule.

In activity-based camps, the educational goal is to reinforce a camper's recent learning, not to teach new skills. To accomplish that, camps generally employ trained teachers, who may get a copy of a child's IEP - and even talk to his teacher - to develop an individualized plan of instruction. At camps where education - language-based learning, reading, or dyslexia remediation - is the primary focus, instruction is more ambitious.

• Campers without "big issues." With the exception of these programs that address behavioral training, most ADD/LD camps accept only children of average to high intelligence who don't have serious behavior problems. Camps don't tolerate kids with drug or alcohol problems. Camp staff typically spend several hours with a prospective camper before accepting him or her. Their goal is to weed out those who are either too low- or too high-functioning. "We want to make sure that we can provide a peer group for every child who attends our camp," says Jonathan Jones, executive director of SOAR, a success-oriented adventure program with 10 different locations.

This article comes from the April/May 2005 issue of ADDitude.

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