Camping can be a great activity for family bonding

Planning a camping trip is one of the best things a family can do. It is a great way to keep in touch with the nature and experience it as one family.  Whether you are camping in the state parks, lakes, mountains, or campgrounds, what matters most is you enjoy the moment together. You build memories as a family while enjoying the scenery around you.

The modern way of living is stressful for both parents and children. Most parents work in a long week, struggling to manage their finances. Other parents work in various shift, while their children spend so much time with their gadgets and other technological devices, making the family time shorter each day.

The drastic decrease in hours where family can be as one hurts everyone inside the home.

In some families, the mealtime conversations are not important anymore. They do not have enough time to sit down and talk about the goals and other family progress. This brings an increasing disconnection of bond to the family.

Meanwhile, there are families that look at camping as a family tradition and camping can also be a great hobby. This tradition can be traced even few generations back. As transportation and mobility is getting easy nowadays, families have started to look at camping as a holiday treat, a necessary break from the stressful urban life.

With the increasing expense of having a holiday trip overseas, families have started to turn to camping holidays instead. As this trend continues, more families now enjoy camping together. Interestingly, there are people who find it a real shame if they have  never experienced camping since childhood. This may be possible when one member of the family has moved to another home, is sick or has died.

 However, to both parents who enjoy doing outdoor activities when they were young, they can easily pass the camping tradition to their own children.

Camping with a view

As the parents grow older, the camping time becomes more of a regular thing to do. As the parents started to plan the camping holiday, the children will also become more involved and started to come up with a growing lists of camping equipment and skills.

By giving an opportunity to the children to join in the planning, they will get a real sense of belongingness. 

The time they spend together allows each family member of the family to share, teach or converse.  Moments of laughter will flow naturally, helping everyone to lower their stress level. The bonding they get from talking, singing, playing, and nature watching around the campfire can do much more in their family relationship.

 As camping trips has no limitation, family can bring their teenagers, toddlers, and even the old members of the family, providing a quality time to all.

Camping time

Some camping activities for great family bonding

The camping activities with the family should be well-planned. From selecting the camping site to reservations, food preparation and games, all these things should be planned ahead of time.

Play games

Whatever the time of the day, a game never fails to bring fun to everyone. You can try group sports, hiking, star gazing, or simply, play some board games. Games that are easy to plan include Apples to Apples, Balderdash, and card games like UNO.

Get Active

Make it sure that everyone is participating in the camping. Ensure the active presence of the family during the different activities. Games that bring so much physical presence include capture the flag or frisbee. For little children, they can have Duck Duck Goose around the campfire. Make it sure that the activities do not require lots of equipment or do not require gear at all. If you want to know what gears are a must, read camping gear reviews from reputable sources online. 

Hiking

Hiking allows everyone to move around from the campsite and enjoy a great view of the nature. If hiking can be tiring to some members of the family, they can try nature scavenger hunt. You can create the list, and children will start crossing the items they find and have fun together.

Cooking

Cooking together helps the family become one. They take part in preparing the food and enjoy the taste of the meal together. 

Campfire

Campfire building is an essential part in camping. Find a good source of dry woods. Make sure that the fire is done in a safe location or in a designated campfire area. Watch the children as they build or play around the campfire.

Orienteering

To add learning activities to camping, you can try orienteering using a compass and a small map. This is a very engaging activity to the family as everyone becomes involved in finding or following the right directions.

Geocaching

Family can use their smartphones to make caches and put it on a website. This is an interesting adventure because other app users can also check it, and perhaps take or leave an item as a souvenir.

Storytelling

There is no substitute to a family storytelling time. You can also play a game in doing this. You can have a chain story using initial phrases or sentences for the other member of the family to continue until you arrive to the end of your story.

Role playing

Performing skits or rehearsing a corny play is one way of building and reconnecting family ties. This activity help everyone in building great memory as a family.