Parents say getting their kids into summer camp is a nightmare. They're doing everything from using spreadsheets to waking up at dawn to do it.

• The hot topic on parenting social media has been how impossible it is to get kids into summer camp.
• Even months ahead of the warm days of summer, camps are getting booked within minutes.

Before 5 a.m. on the day the portal opened, Samara Klar logged onto her computer in Tucson, Arizona, and loaded the website for her daughter's chosen summer camp, ready to sign her up. Six hours later, the camp had reached capacity. This was six months out from the start of camp.

In Minnesota, Katie Dohman saw her social-media feed blow up around 6 a.m. one day in January as the "affordable camp" — still unaffordable, she said — in her area opened its online registration, then promptly crashed. "It broke the internet," Dohman said. "Everybody was like, 'The site totally broke down, I'm in a panic, what am I going to do with my kids this summer? I have no place to put my kids, and I have to work.'"

The days of January may be short and dark, but it is open season for summer camp sign-up. And this year, right on time, the stress of early deadlines, the competition for places, and the steep cost of child supervision over the summer months bled beyond the portals and onto social media.

Camps have raised their prices and moved to winter enrollment

"Summer-camp sign-up is sphincter-clenching terror," Ray Dubicki, whose children prefer to attend different camps, often with different sign-up schedules, wrote on Twitter. "The process of finding that out, lining up reservations, and logging in at exactly the sign-up time is a level of mad stress," he told Insider.

Rebounding from pandemic levels, US summer camps are estimated to be a $3.6 billion industry in 2023, according to the industry researcher IBISWorld.

In 2022, camps raised their prices by about 35% from the year before in response to inflation, according to the American Camp Association, which found that this had no effect on parents' willingness to pay those prices. The association recommended camps use higher prices, winter enrollments, and buy-now, pay-later plans as strategies to boost revenue in 2023.

Of course, working parents may have no other choice but to pay for day camps.

It's even harder for parents of kids with disabilities

Monica Schneider is a professor of political science and gender studies at Miami University who is well-versed in the summer-childcare gap. "If I had a dollar for every mom in my mom's group who said, 'I don't know what to do, I'm probably going to have to quit my job,' I'd be able to open all of the summer camps," she told Insider.

Schneider has an autistic 11-year-old son with Down syndrome who has no camps available to him unless Schneider were to pay for a full-time sitter to accompany him each day. Even then, her options are limited to a zoo camp or a camp for autistic kids.

"He doesn't want to sit in our house all summer or be with a babysitter all summer. He wants to go swimming and hit a baseball," she said. "I just want him to live his best life and enjoy being around other kids and be included."

"We need to include people with disabilities in our lives. It's not only good for him, but it's also good for the other kids. It's good for society," she said.

Summer camps come with a high price tag for many

In Washington, DC, Sibel Oktay devoted a weekend to researching and tabulating summer camp options for her daughter, comparing the experience to trying to get her hands on Pearl Jam tickets. As an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois, Oktay is an accomplished researcher and found the process maddening. "How are we supposed to plan all this six months ahead of time? We have to pull out spreadsheets, identify the week, and so on and so forth," she told Insider.

She pointed out that summer camps, which can cost as much as $4,000 a month per child, are economically prohibitive for many. "Not every parent or not every household can afford this because they do ask for an arm and a leg if you're trying to fill out an entire summer with these kinds of activities," she said.

At the same time, there is the understandable desire to choose a camp that suits your child's interests and to nurture them. Evidence suggests that summer camps can offer children real benefits outside of saving their parents' jobs.

There are benefits of summer camp for children

A 2022 study published in PLOS One found that Swiss children reported significantly stronger feelings of altruism after attending camp than peers who did not attend. "Our study suggests that attendance of summer camps can foster children's altruistic intentions, which can be viewed as a positive outcome at both the individual and social level," Yves Gerber, a research assistant at the University of Geneva who coauthored the study, told Insider by email.

Previous industry research has also found important socio-emotional benefits to attending camp.

Ironically, parents lean heavily on their socio-emotional coping skills as they navigate sign-up, Sara Petersen, the author of the forthcoming book "Momfluenced," said. Petersen devoted a recent newsletter to the hellacious trade-offs of summer-camp sign-up, from "weighing the pros and cons of a soccer camp five miles away (but only a half day!) versus a seacoast science camp 30 minutes away (but full day!)."

The only thing that makes the gauntlet of camp registration manageable is the chorus of similarly infuriated parents, Petersen told Insider.

"While the summer-camp 'system' is inherently inequitable and excludes many people on both a financial and a cultural capital basis, sharing text threads and spreadsheets with friends not only divides labor but also provides a very necessary release valve for rage, anxiety, and general dread," she said in an email.

More than one parent — this reporter included — has considered simply leaving the United States for cheaper international waters during summer-camp season. Virginia Duan, a mother of four who's pregnant with her fifth, is flying to Taiwan for the summer and has already missed the early-bird prices for international camps.

"Those started registering in November/December of 2022, and I ignored them completely," she said.