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Summer camp is supposed to be fun.

It’s a place for swimming, crafts, new friendships, and learning repetitive songs that will annoy your family members well into September. What’s not to like?

A lot, apparently. One big reason parents are letting their children “rot” at home this summer, according to the New York Times, is that kids complain so much about going to camp.

Of course, kids have always whined about doing stuff, even stuff they basically like. But one reader, Juliana, wrote to me recently that while she enjoyed day camp as a child, “my kid tells us every day he doesn’t want to go back.” Is it possible that camp is just worse now?

It’s definitely different. Experts and parents alike report a shift towards ever more specialized camps — focused on everything from coding to urban farming — and toward shorter, 1- or 2-week sessions rather than camps that run the full summer. While these changes can give families more flexibility and kids a chance to pursue their interests, they can also make it more challenging to form friendships and turn camp into an extension of the high-pressure environment many kids already face during the school year.

I can’t say definitively whether camp is less fun than it used to be, but I did come away from my reporting with a better understanding of what kids get out of camp, what adults want them to get, and why the two don’t always match up.

The history of camp

Summer camp in America started in the 19th century as a response to anxieties about urbanization and its effects on boys and young men. One early camp founder, Ernest Balch, complained about “the miserable condition of boys from well-to-do families in the summer hotels,” starting his camp so that boys would have to learn to fend for themselves in nature.

Early camps emphasized the character-building powers of the wilderness. As one brochure put it, “A camp in the woods........

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