10 Best Tips & Tricks For Taking Your Kids Camping

Camping with the family is a fun, relaxing adventure, but there are times it can be stressful or anxiety-inducing for the parents. We recently took our kids for their first time backpack camping, and wanted to share our 10 best tips and tricks to help make sure that everyone has a great time!

1) Carry Your Own Weight

We believe that our kids should be able to be responsible for carrying pretty much everything they will need to bring along for their own personal use on a camping trip. This is an important tip for a lot of reasons. It gives them a sense of ownership over what they choose to bring and what they leave home; they get a good lesson in minimalist packing for camping; they learn what they can easily live without; and the parents aren’t saddled with ultra-heavy packs laden down with unnecessary items.

Of course, a parent should check on the kids’ choices before setting out for the trip to make sure they’ve got enough socks and not too many toys, but overall, once your child is about 5 or older, he or she should be able to take on this responsibility. We are big believers in fostering a sense of independence and personal responsibility in our kids!

2) Give The Kids A Job

Along the same lines of personal responsibility, we make a point of giving the kids a job as soon as we arrive at our camping location. It can be as simple as gathering sticks for kindling, or rocks for a fire circle, or as complex as setting up the “kitchen”, organizing the sleeping arrangements, or even putting up their own tent once they’ve learned how. It may take some extra time to get everything set up correctly and safely the first few times, but helping kids master tasks independently has many benefits.

Younger kids love helping Mom and Dad, while older kids can really actually take a significant workload off the parents. Giving the kids an age-appropriate job, and showing them the best way to complete it, keeps them engaged and busy, and teaches them valuable skills that will not only relate to camping in the future,. It also helps build a real sense of family unity and community.

3) Set Specific Expectations

Click to see the video for how we completed this step on our recent family camping trip!

This tip is a bit harder to explain, but basically what we mean by setting specific expectations is to constantly let everyone know what specifically they need to do to help, as well as what’s happening next, what needs to get done in order to move on to the next thing, and when they can expect to eat, sleep, swim, go fishing, etc.

For example, if your kids don’t have any idea when they’ll get to jump in the lake for a swim, you might end up with whiny, uncooperative, bored kids while you’re trying to get a tent set up, or hoist a food bag into a tree. That’s annoying and not fun for anyone. Instead, set their expectations clearly, ahead of time. “Once we get the tent all set up, we’re all going to change clothes and then go for a swim!”. More often than not, the kids’ response will be to ask how they can help to move things along faster. Win win!

4) Find Chances To Build Their Self-Esteem

Family camping is about more than spending time in the great outdoors. It’s also about strengthening family ties, and about helping kids build a healthier self-image. Opportunities for teaching moments come up constantly when we are doing activities with our kids, whether it’s camping or fishing, or crafts or even playing games.

Sutton got a big confidence boost when I pointed out how great a job she was doing! Click to see the video clip.

On our most recent trip, 10 year old Sutton commented that she was “not sure how people did this”, when gathering firewood. I immediately took the opportunity to point out that while it is a lot of work, she WAS doing it, and doing a great job! Little moments like this are surprisingly memorable for kids, as she mentioned this exchange to me later. She said that it really motivated her to keep working hard, and even to find bigger, heavier pieces of wood to challenge herself with.

Building self-esteem in kids does not have to be complicated or psycho-babble-wimpy stuff at all; you just look for every opportunity to build them up and point out when they are doing a great job of something!

5) Take A Break To Laugh Together

Sometimes the silly, funny moments are the best! Taking a moment to laugh with one another can build lasting memories for everyone in the family. In our case, Brian and I have had to really learn to just take a moment, step back from our normal “goal oriented” mentality that’s focused on getting stuff done ASAP, and just laugh and enjoy the surroundings and the cleverness of our kids! You know you’ve accomplished this when your New Yorker husband starts trying to sing Johnny Cash songs!

We love creating these little moments, and a lot of them end up becoming family jokes that will live on for many years to come.

6) Celebrate Your Achievements As A Family

What do I mean by “celebrate your achievements”? It’s important to take time to look at what you’ve accomplished by working together. Stop and look around, and then check in with the kids every now and then to make sure they see that all the hard work of setting up a campsite, gathering wood, clearing the tent sites, etc., has been accomplished TOGETHER. This helps build their self-esteem, as mentioned earlier, but it also helps remind us as parents that everything is better when we do it together.

Part of the fun of camping is to “conquer the elements”, so taking a few moments to sit back and look at your progress can be really rewarding for everyone in the family. Celebrate how far you’ve come!

7) Make Kids’ Experiences The Priority

Aiden caught the biggest fish BY FAR! And we were thrilled for him.

One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned taking our kids fishing is that on these trips, Mom and Dad aren’t going to be spending that much time actually fishing. And that’s OK! We work hard to make sure that our priority is to give the kids a good time. Their experiences teach them lessons, give them a sense of accomplishment, and often end up being even more fun for us than if we were the ones doing the fishing and catching.

The same is true for activities like taking your kids camping. Try to make sure that you’re focusing more on making the trip valuable and fun for them, as opposed to striving toward a perfect outdoorsman level of execution in everything you do while you’re camping. It’s a lot less stressful this way, the kids enjoy it more, and you’ll feel great seeing the smiles on their faces!

8) Shortcuts Are Okay!

Camping with kids is not the time to be a staunch technical purist. If you need to “cheat” a little bit by bringing charcoal or a little dry firewood from home, then do what’s necessary to streamline the experience. The point is to do what’s needed to make sure everyone stays safe, warm, dry and happy. A family camping trip is not the time to prove your bushcraft survivalist skills (unless you’re seriously a hardcore expert in that sort of thing, I guess!). It’s a time to simply enjoy being together in nature, and accomplish the necessities of setting up a campsite efficiently and effectively.

On our recent trip, we knew that it had rained a lot over the past week, and that finding dry tinder and wood might be a challenge, so we packed our BBQ chimney and a bit of charcoal. It didn’t add much weight to our packs, but it made starting a fire about a thousand times easier! Here’s the one we like, in case you’re interested. It’s the Weber 7416 Rapidfire Chimney Starter, and it’s less than $30 on Amazon. Worth its weight in gold, for both camping as well as at-home grilling or use with the smoker. (Note: this is an Amazon Associates link, so if you purchase through this link, we’ll get a few pennies to help support our blog & YouTube channel)

9) Don’t Forget To Floss!

OK, this one is a joke…you’ll just have to click below to watch the full video! (Hint: start at 8:57). Aiden loves to throw his favorite Fortnite dance moves into any video we shoot, and this one was no exception.

10) S’mores Cure All

Whatever you do, don’t forget the S’mores fixings! We love to experiment with different flavors of S’mores, whether camping or at home, where we make them on the grill, or even in the fireplace.

A few of our favorites have included:

Nutella Banana S’mores (just like it sounds!)
Double Chocolate (use chocolate graham crackers)
Fluffernutter (chocolate graham crackers, peanut butter & marshmallow)
Caramel S’mores (use jarred caramel sauce in place of chocolate)
Salted Caramel S’mores (saltine crackers, caramel sauce, peanut butter or chocolate)

Get creative and have fun with them! We’ve found tons of great recipe ideas on Pinterest and other blogs. The kids love coming up with new combinations, and they always surprise us with how delicious they are!

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