Tennis camp keeps kids active and off screens by occupying the hours rather than policing the device. A child who is on court from nine until four is not exercising willpower about a tablet, because the hours in which they would have used it are already spoken for. That distinction between substitution and restriction is the whole mechanism, and it is why a structured summer works when household screen rules often do not. School lets out each June for roughly 6.7 million Canadian children and youth aged 5 to 19, according to Statistics Canada, and more than half of children and youth aged 3 to 17 already exceed the national recreational screen time guideline. Below we cover what the guideline actually says, where Canadian children currently sit against it, what summer does to both numbers, how many hours a camp day genuinely displaces, and what to do with the hours camp does not cover.
How Does Tennis Camp Keep Kids Active and Off Screens?
Tennis camp keeps kids active and off screens through substitution rather than restriction. The hours get filled with something a child would rather be doing, which removes the negotiation entirely instead of winning it.
Substitution matters because restriction is a daily argument and substitution is a single decision. A parent who sets a two-hour screen limit has to enforce it every afternoon for ten weeks. A parent who books a camp week has made one choice that covers thirty-five hours, and nobody has to be talked out of anything at two o’clock on a Tuesday. The same logic applies to any structured summer activity, and tennis simply happens to be one that also delivers a large volume of movement.
The scale of the summer effect is worth knowing before booking anything. An accelerometer study published in Frontiers in Public Health measured children aged 6 to 9 across a summer holiday and found overall physical activity dropped 18 per cent and moderate to vigorous activity dropped 45 per cent compared with the school term. Nearly half the vigorous movement in a child’s life disappears when school stops, which is the gap that structured summer camp weeks exist to fill.
How to Keep Kids Off Screens
You keep kids off screens by replacing the time rather than removing the device, building structure into the day, and agreeing the rules before the holidays start rather than during them. Removal on its own creates a vacuum, and a bored child fills a vacuum with whatever is nearest.
Replacement works because it competes on the child’s terms. A screen is available, immediate, and requires nothing from anybody else, so an alternative has to be at least as easy to start. Something already booked, already paid for, and already in the calendar clears that bar in a way that “go outside and play” does not. Booking beats suggesting, every time.
Structure is the second half, and there is good evidence behind it. Researchers describing the Structured Days Hypothesis in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity found that adult-supervised, pre-planned days are associated with better activity, screen time, and sleep patterns than unstructured ones. The finding is not that screens are uniquely powerful. It is that unstructured time is what lets them expand.
Timing the conversation is the third piece. Rules agreed in June, when nobody is mid-argument and nothing has been taken away yet, hold up far better than rules imposed in late July after a fortnight of drift. Agreeing them with a child rather than announcing them to one also tends to survive contact with the actual summer.
How Much Screen Time Is Recommended for Kids?
The recommendation is no more than two hours per day of recreational screen time for children and youth aged 5 to 17, and no more than one hour per day for children aged 3 to 4. Those figures come from the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines, developed by the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology and echoed by the Canadian Paediatric Society.
One word in that guideline does a lot of work, and it is regularly dropped in summaries. The recommendation addresses recreational screen time specifically, which means time spent on entertainment rather than every minute a child spends looking at a display. Homework on a laptop, a video call with a grandparent, and a coach reviewing swing footage are not what the two-hour figure is measuring, and treating them as though they were makes the guideline look impossible and therefore easy to dismiss.
The guideline also sits inside a larger set rather than standing alone. The same document recommends at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity daily for ages 5 to 17, several hours of light activity, and 9 to 11 hours of sleep for children aged 5 to 13 or 8 to 10 hours for youth aged 14 to 17. The four behaviours are treated as one 24-hour package because they compete with each other for the same day.
How Much Screen Time Do Canadian Kids Actually Get?
Most Canadian children exceed the guideline, and 54 per cent of children and youth aged 3 to 17 went over the recreational screen time recommendation in 2024, while 46 per cent met it, according to Statistics Canada’s Canadian Health Measures Survey. Compliance has also been moving in one direction.
The direction is downward across recent survey cycles. The share of children meeting screen time recommendations declined from 73 per cent to 62 per cent between the 2018 to 2019 and 2022 to 2024 cycles, and among youth aged 12 to 17 the figure sits at roughly 28 per cent. Physical activity has moved similarly in the same age band, with the proportion of 12 to 17 year olds meeting activity guidelines falling from 36 per cent to 22 per cent.
Sedentary time puts those numbers in perspective better than the screen figures alone. Youth aged 12 to 17 average 10.6 hours per day of sedentary time, which is higher than adults at 9.3 hours, children at 7.6 hours, and preschoolers at 6.6 hours, according to the same survey as reported by ParticipACTION. Teenagers are the most sedentary group in the country, including by comparison with the adults who worry about them. None of this is a verdict on any individual family, and it is worth reading as context rather than as an accusation.
Does Screen Time Go Up in the Summer?
Yes, screen time goes up in the summer, and physical activity falls at the same time, which means both halves of the 24-hour package move in the wrong direction at once. Statistics Canada has published analysis on exactly this question, and the pattern is consistent enough that public health researchers treat summer as a distinct risk window rather than a neutral gap.
The activity side is the better-measured half. Across a summer holiday, accelerometer-measured overall activity in children aged 6 to 9 fell 18 per cent and moderate to vigorous activity fell 45 per cent. The same study found activity remained 8.8 per cent below baseline even after the holidays ended, which means the pattern established in July does not simply reset in September.
Two months is long enough for habits to set rather than merely lapse. That is the practical reason summer matters more than a few weeks of school break might suggest, and it is why the decision about how a child’s July looks tends to influence their October as well.
Why Does Summer Make Screen Time Harder to Manage?
Summer makes screen time harder to manage because the school day was doing most of the work, and nothing automatically replaces it. A school day supplies recess, physical education, transitions between classes, a fixed wake time, and roughly six hours in which a screen is simply not an option.
Remove that scaffolding and the day does not become neutral. Researchers describe this as the Structured Days Hypothesis: unstructured days lend themselves to less movement, more screen time, and irregular sleep, not because children change in July but because the environment does. Weekends behave the same way in miniature, which is why weekend activity levels have long been measured lower than weekday levels during term.
Baseline compliance leaves little room to give back. Only 39 per cent of Canadian children and youth meet the daily activity recommendation according to ParticipACTION’s Report Card, and just 4 per cent meet the full combined set of movement guidelines. Starting from there and then removing the structure of a school day is why North York families often find that a summer plan made in May stops resembling reality by the middle of July.
How Many Hours Does a Camp Day Replace?
A camp day replaces three hours in a half-day format, seven hours in a full day, and up to ten hours with extended care. Those are hours in which a recreational screen is not available, and comparing them against a two-hour daily guideline is the clearest way to see what a booked week actually does.
| Format | Hours On Site | Recreational Screen Hours Displaced Per Day | Across a Five-Day Week | Best Suited To |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No camp booked | 0 | 0 | 0 | Families with other structured activities already in place |
| Half day, 1:00 to 4:00 PM | 3 | Up to 3 | Up to 15 | Ages 4 to 7, and first-time campers of any age |
| Full day, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM | 7 | Up to 7 | Up to 35 | Ages 8 and up, and children who handle a half day comfortably |
| Full day plus extended care, 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM | 10 | Up to 10 | Up to 50 | Working families needing coverage across a full workday |
Sources: our own published session hours and extended care window; Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines recreational screen time recommendation; Statistics Canada Canadian Health Measures Survey.
Two honest caveats belong with that table. The hours describe what the format makes available rather than a promise about how any particular child spends the rest of their evening, since a seven-hour camp day followed by four hours of gaming is entirely possible. The other is that more hours is not automatically better, because a five-year-old at full day sessions in week one is usually a tired five-year-old rather than a more active one.
How Much Physical Activity Does a Camp Day Deliver?
A camp day delivers four hours of court instruction in a full-day format and three hours in a half day, which clears the national daily activity recommendation several times over before the afternoon starts. Displaced hours and active hours are not the same thing, and this is the section where they meet.
The activity guideline is easier to hit than most parents expect once a child is on a court. The Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines call for at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day for ages 5 to 17, and tennis produces that inside the first drill block through repeated sprinting, stopping, changing direction, and swinging. The same guidelines also call for muscle and bone strengthening activity on three days a week, which hard-court movement supplies without anybody scheduling it separately.
Set against current baselines, that volume is substantial. Statistics Canada data from the Canadian Health Measures Survey, reported by the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, shows 49 per cent of children aged 5 to 11 and 36 per cent of youth aged 12 to 17 meeting national activity guidelines. A week of camp moves a child from whichever side of that line they were on to comfortably above it, for that week at least.
Does Being Active at Camp Change Habits After It Ends?
Being active at camp can influence habits after it ends, though the evidence points to an association rather than a guarantee. Activity and screen time tend to move together in the same children over time, and the direction of that relationship is worth setting out honestly.
A Statistics Canada longitudinal study measured the same youth cohort in 2019 and again in 2023. Across those four years, 37 per cent exceeded screen time recommendations in both years and only 14 per cent met them in both. Youth who met the screen recommendations in both years were nearly twice as likely to be meeting physical activity guidelines by 2023, at 20 per cent compared with 12 per cent among those who exceeded them. That is an association rather than proof that one causes the other, and it is still useful, because it suggests the two behaviours travel as a pattern rather than independently.
What is more clearly established is that the summer pattern carries forward. Activity measured 8.8 per cent below baseline even after the holidays ended, which means a July spent one way tends to shape September rather than being erased by it. That cuts both directions, and it is the strongest practical argument for booking something rather than intending to. Children who fall away entirely and come back later can absolutely rebuild, and returning to the court a long break is its own skill, but keeping the thread unbroken costs far less effort.
Why Do Kids Choose Tennis Over a Screen?
Kids choose tennis over a screen when tennis delivers the same things a screen delivers, faster and with other children present. Screens are not compelling by accident. They are built around a small set of features, and a well-run court supplies every one of them.
Here is the mapping, in rough order of strength:
- Instant feedback. A game tells a child immediately whether that worked. So does a ball, which lands in or out within a second of contact, several hundred times per session.
- Visible progress. Games show levels and scores. Tennis shows a rally that used to end at three shots and now reaches eight, which a child notices without anyone pointing it out.
- Difficulty that matches ability. Games scale to the player. Tennis Canada’s Progressive Tennis system does the same by scaling the court and the ball, from a 36 foot court and a 75 per cent lower compression ball for ages 4 to 8 up to the full 78 foot court and standard ball at 11 and over.
- Agency. Games let a child decide what happens next. So does a tennis point, where the child alone chooses where to move, which shot to play, and where to aim it.
- Other people. Much of the pull of gaming is social. A court supplies that in person, with the same faces every day for a week.
The decision load is also part of the appeal, and it appears to leave a mark. Research published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found children aged 8 to 12 with longer tennis training experience showed better working memory, better cognitive flexibility, and faster reaction times than children with shorter training histories. Tennis is a genuinely demanding game to play well, which is precisely why children who get properly taught tend to stay interested, and why our team builds games and competition into every level rather than saving them for the advanced groups.
Which Camp Format Displaces the Most Screen Time?
A full day with extended care displaces the most screen time, at up to ten hours per day, followed by a full day at seven and a half day at three. Displacement is not the only criterion, though, and the format that covers the most hours is not automatically the right one for a given child.
Age is the main constraint. A four to seven-year-old is usually at their limit after three hours, and a longer day produces a tired child rather than a more active one, which does nothing for the evening. Children aged eight and up generally handle full days from the outset, and the age band where the national data looks most concerning is older still, since the share of 12 to 17 year olds meeting activity guidelines has fallen from 36 to 22 per cent while 91 per cent of preschoolers and 52 per cent of children aged 5 to 11 still meet them. Older juniors are the group with the most to gain from a full junior camp day.
Booking pattern matters as much as daily length. Three consecutive weeks of half days displaces more hours than one scattered week of full days, and it also gives a child continuity with the same coach and group. If you are weighing the two formats against each other rather than against no camp at all, we have covered the day camp options comparison separately, including age, endurance, and schedule.
What About the Hours Camp Does Not Cover?
The hours camp does not cover are evenings, weekends, and any week you have not booked, and across a ten-week summer that is most of the available time. A camp week handles the middle of the day, and the rest still belongs to the household.
Evenings are the pressure point, particularly after a full day. A child who has been active for seven hours is legitimately tired, and an hour on a screen after dinner is a reasonable thing rather than a failure. The two-hour recreational guideline is a daily figure, not a weekly one, so an evening of screen time after an active day sits comfortably inside it. Among youth aged 12 to 17, only around 28 per cent meet that guideline at all, which suggests the realistic goal for most families is movement toward it rather than perfect compliance.
Practical ways to cover the remaining hours without adding another booked activity:
- Keep one anchor per weekend day. A swim, a bike ride, or a walk with a specific destination is enough to shape the day around.
- Leave the equipment visible. A racquet by the door gets used far more often than one in a cupboard.
- Use the shoulder hours. Before nine and after six are the coolest and quietest parts of an Ontario summer day and the easiest time to get outside.
- Give screen time a place rather than a limit. A named slot after dinner is easier to hold than a running total nobody is tracking accurately.
- Book non-camp weeks loosely. One outing planned per day, however small, prevents the whole week defaulting indoors.
- Add a short individual session in a quiet week. Private sessions run seven days a week and work well for keeping a hand in during a week with no camp booked.
Is All Screen Time the Same?
No, all screen time is not the same, and the Canadian guideline addresses recreational screen time specifically rather than every minute in front of a display. Treating homework, video calls, and entertainment as one undifferentiated total is the fastest way to make the guideline feel unreachable.
The categories that sit outside the recreational count include schoolwork and summer reading on a device, video calls with family, and anything genuinely creative or instructional that a child is producing rather than consuming. A child editing a video they filmed is doing something different from a child watching an autoplaying feed, even though both are looking at a screen. Coaches use video review on rainy days for the same reason, and nobody would count that against a child’s leisure total.
Content and context matter alongside category. Screen time with a parent, screen time with friends in the same room, and screen time alone at midnight are three different things. None of this makes the two-hour figure meaningless, and it does mean the useful question for a family is what a child is doing on the device and what it is displacing, rather than a running clock nobody enjoys enforcing.
What Does a Realistic Summer Screen Plan Look Like?
A realistic summer screen plan sets the anchors first, counts only recreational time, names a slot rather than a limit, and expects to be renegotiated. Plans that survive a summer are built around what a child is doing rather than around what they are not allowed to do.
Anchors come first because everything else arranges itself around them. Book the camp weeks, name the weekend activity, and fix the wake time, and the screen question largely answers itself in the gaps that remain. Sleep is worth protecting as one of those anchors, since the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines call for 9 to 11 hours for children aged 5 to 13 and 8 to 10 hours for youth aged 14 to 17, and a consistent wake time in July is what makes September bearable.
Then keep the plan honest. A version that survives ten weeks usually has five features:
- Recreational time only. Homework, reading on a device, and family video calls sit outside the count.
- A named slot rather than a running total. After dinner until bedtime is enforceable; a mental tally is not.
- Agreed with the child, not for them. A rule a child helped set is one they will argue for rather than against.
- Written somewhere visible. A note on the fridge settles more disputes than any conversation.
- Reviewed in mid-August. Expect the June version to have stopped matching reality by then, and change it rather than abandon it.
Renegotiating is a feature rather than a failure. The outdoor season across the North York area runs from late June into early September, which is a genuinely short window and a good argument for front-loading the outdoor anchors while the weather holds. Our seasonal programs are booked weekly precisely so that a family can build a summer around whatever else is in it.
How Do You Keep Kids Active After Summer Ends?
You keep kids active after summer ends by booking the next season before this one finishes. September is the point at which most summer gains are either consolidated or quietly lost, and the deciding factor is usually whether anything is already in the calendar.
The post-holiday dip is measurable rather than theoretical. Activity remained 8.8 per cent below baseline after the summer holidays in the accelerometer study cited earlier, which means the pattern established over ten weeks carries into the school year rather than correcting itself when classes resume. Six weeks of fall programming after the summer is the cheapest available way to hold the gains through to the following spring.
Continuity across the whole year is what turns a good summer into a habit. Two sessions a week through spring sessions keeps both the tennis and the fitness intact, and it means a child arrives at the following June ahead rather than starting over. Children who follow that cycle tend to move up a Progressive Tennis stage each year rather than every second year.
Enjoyment is the variable that decides whether any of it continues, and the retention figures are blunt. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that roughly 70 per cent of youth athletes leave organized sport by age 13, with loss of enjoyment among the leading causes. A child who is being pushed to be active will find a screen the moment nobody is watching, and a child who wants to be on court does not need managing at all, which is why we have written separately about staying motivated across a whole junior career.
Summing It Up
The screen conversation gets framed as a discipline problem, and it is mostly a scheduling one. The Canadian guideline asks for no more than two hours of recreational screen time a day for school-aged children, more than half of Canadian children and youth currently exceed it, and summer is when both that figure and the activity figure move in the wrong direction at once, with vigorous movement falling by nearly half. What changes those numbers is not a stricter rule but a filled calendar, and a full camp day occupies seven hours on site or ten with extended care, four of which are spent on a tennis court.
Forty years of running summer programs in Bayview Village has taught us that the children who stay active are rarely the ones with the strictest screen rules at home. They are the ones who have something they would rather be doing, and a week on court is a reliable way to find out whether tennis is that thing for your child. If you would like help working out which weeks, format, and group would suit them, talk to us or call 905-889-7293.
Everyone at Bayview Village Tennis Camp is happy to walk through the options with you before you commit to anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Much Screen Time Should a Child Have in the Summer?
A child aged 5 to 17 should have no more than two hours of recreational screen time per day in summer, and a child aged 3 to 4 no more than one hour, according to the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines. The recommendation does not change between term time and holidays, though holding it becomes harder without the structure of a school day. It also counts recreational time only, so schoolwork, summer reading on a device, and video calls with family sit outside the figure.
Do Kids Use Phones at Tennis Camp?
Kids do not use phones during tennis camp sessions, and phones are best left at home entirely. There is nothing to use one for on court, they get lost or damaged in a group of active children, and they pull a child away from the group during exactly the breaks when friendships form. Parents who need a child to carry one for the journey should send it in the bag rather than the pocket, and let a coach know.
Does Being More Active Actually Reduce Screen Time?
Activity and screen time tend to move together in the same children, though the research shows an association rather than proven cause and effect. A Statistics Canada longitudinal study found that youth who met screen time recommendations in both 2019 and 2023 were nearly twice as likely to be meeting physical activity guidelines by 2023, at 20 per cent compared with 12 per cent among those who exceeded the screen recommendations in both years. The practical version is simpler: occupied hours cannot be screen hours, whatever the direction of the underlying relationship.
What Can Kids Do Instead of Screens on a Rainy Day?
On a rainy day, kids can do conditioning work, footwork drills, indoor games, and skills practice that transfers straight back to court. Camp sessions do not stop for rain either, since the schedule shifts to fitness conditioning, footwork, tactical discussion, and video review rather than being cancelled. At home, shadow swings in a hallway, ball bouncing on a racquet face, and a simple movement circuit fill an hour and cost nothing.
Does Screen Time Affect Children’s Sleep?
Recreational screen time is treated as one of four interconnected behaviours in the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines precisely because it competes with sleep and activity for the same 24 hours. The guidelines call for 9 to 11 hours of sleep for children aged 5 to 13 and 8 to 10 hours for youth aged 14 to 17, alongside the two-hour recreational screen recommendation. Protecting a consistent wake time through the summer is the single most practical way to keep the sleep side intact, and an active day tends to help a child settle at night.
How Do You Get a Child to Want to Be Outside?
You get a child to want to be outside by giving them something specific to do out there with other children present. General encouragement to go outside rarely works, because outside on its own is not an activity. A booked session, a friend arriving, a destination for a bike ride, or a racquet left by the door all supply the missing specificity. Children who find one outdoor thing they genuinely enjoy stop needing to be sent, which is the whole objective.
