Entertainment
6 Surprising Things I’ve Learned About Camping with Kids
Before having kids, my husband and I spent our anniversaries camping on an island off the coast of Washington State. We’d pitch our tent in the woods and wake to the sound of harbor seals splashing in the waves. Then, when I was pregnant with our firstborn, we went camping in the nearby national forest. I spent the lazy days reading in a hammock by the river, and in the evenings, we sat by the fire, imagining the family camping trips we’d soon take.
The next summer, we returned to the national forest with our six-month-old. Not only did we forget to bring firewood, but within an hour of falling asleep, our daughter woke up inconsolable. Eventually, we packed up our gear and left, grateful the next morning to wake up surrounded by all the comforts of home.
We waited a year to try again and were pleasantly surprised at how fun it was to camp once our daughter was a bit older. Over time, we’ve figured out what works (and doesn’t work), and now family camping trips are one of our favorite pastimes. Here are six things we’ve learned…
1. It doesn’t take much to have fun outdoors.
Our favorite state parks have amenities our kids enjoy, like playgrounds and paddle boat rentals and ice cream stands, but we have the same amount of fun at campgrounds without much entertainment. We’ve learned to pack accordingly. We bring a frisbee and whiffle ball to the campground with the big grassy field; we bring a kite and sand toys to the one with the beach; and we always bring our field guides and binoculars (plus a monocular, which I’ve found is easier for kids to use). With freedom to explore, our kids usually make their own fun. And, this may be breaking all the rules, but when we camp at state parks on the San Juan Islands, we make a vacation out of it, heading into town to browse the bookstore and get coffee and pastries or to (gasp!) eat at a nice restaurant.
2. Camping with children looks different, and that’s okay.
When our youngest was born, we upgraded from our two-person backpacking tent to a family-sized tent (similar), which the kids named Bluey. We also bought a used pop-up camper, which has made camping even more comfortable. (We switch off between the two, depending on the campsite.) When our kids are older, we’ll take them on remote backpacking adventures, but for now, I appreciate the ease. We decorate the camper with stickers from every campground we visit. Older couples walk by and tell us, We used to bring our kids here. Tucked into the camper at night, listening to the sounds of my family breathing, I think, this is all I need to feel at home.
3. Group camping trips are like a big sleepover.
Every year we go on group camping trips with friends, and we always come away from these weekends saying, this is why we camp. The big kids race their bikes in loops around the campground and lead the younger kids in sprawling games of make believe. And it’s fun for the grown ups, too — we enjoy the unhurried time to hang out. Every meal is a potluck, and if you run out of sunscreen or forgot to pack ketchup? There’s always more than enough to go around. After the kids fall sleep, someone puts another log on the fire. Some of us drift off to our tents, and some of us stay up, talking and laughing quietly until it’s time to douse the embers and call it a night.
4. Park rangers are the best.
We’ve found that some state parks have ranger-led nature activities for kids, so it’s something we ask about when checking in. One of my daughter’s favorite memories is the time a park ranger stopped by our campsite with booklets filled with nature-themed puzzles and activities. He promised that once their booklets were completed, they could earn their ‘Junior Park Ranger’ badges. My daughter, who was five at the time, diligently colored her way through the whole book. On the last day of our trip, we stopped at the ranger station. Not only did the ranger on duty bring out a box of wooden badges, he led a very official swearing-in ceremony. I teared up as our kids pledged to care for the land, waterways, and wildlife around us.
5. It’s helpful to take notes for next time.
When it’s time to start packing for a trip, I open the camping checklist I keep in my Notes app. The list keeps getting better over time, since I’m constantly adding anything we wish we’d brought. For food, we chop, dice, and measure out ingredients at home and make as many meals ahead as possible. Because I’m extra, I also like to bake blueberry scones, which we reheat over the fire to enjoy with morning coffee. We use a cast-iron camp cooker for egg sandwiches, which makes breakfast almost as fun as toasting s’mores. While walking around the campground, we keep a note of sites we’d like to reserve for next time and jot down what we liked about them. State parks book up early, so this helps us in late winter when our group chats start buzzing about making reservations.
6. Best of all, our kids remember the good stuff.
When we swap stories about past camping trips, we’re always surprised by what our kids share. They remember the way the stars looked at night while walking to the bathroom, not the runny nose that kept them up late. They remember drinking hot cocoa with marshmallows before breakfast, not the time I cut my palm slicing bagels with a dull knife. They remember listening to audiobooks with their stuffies in the backseat, not the miserable hour my husband and I spent breaking down the campsite in the pouring rain.
Back at home, when our kids wake up and climb into our bed under the eaves, they reach their hands up to touch the low ceiling that slants like a tent above us, and say, It’s just like camping.
Kaitlyn Teer’s debut essay collection Little Apocalypses: Essay on Motherhood, Climate Change, and Hope at the End of the World is out today! She is the senior editor of Big Salad (and you can read her recent Big Salad interview and garden tour here, if you’d like). Kaitlyn lives with her husband and two kids in Bellingham, Washington.
Now, I’d love to hear, do you enjoy camping? What traditions do you look forward to every summer?
P.S. 10 readers share their favorite outdoor activities, and five family vacation ideas.
(Top photo by Dave Hoefler/Unsplash.)
Entertainment
The Roborock RockNeo Q110H robot lawn mower just landed at Amazon, and its on sale for just 1 week
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Roborock makes some of Mashable’s favorite robot vacuums that efficiently keep our floors clean indoors. But the brand knew some robots prefer a life spent outdoors. As of June 10, the Roborock lineup of robot lawn mowers has a new model, and it’s one of the most affordable options available.
$1,169
at Amazon
$1,299
Save $130
The Roborock RockNeo Q110H just landed in the U.S., and it’s exclusively sold at Amazon. The normal list price is set at $1,299, but it’s on sale from June 10 through June 16 for $1,169, which takes 10% off. Even at full price, the Roborock sits as one of the more budget-friendly models.
The new Roborock RockNeo Q110H is designed for yards with about 0.25 acres of grass.
Credit: Roborock
Standout features of the Roborock RockNeo Q110H
The Roborock RockNeo is designed to mow lawns that measure about 0.25 acres, and it can handle slopes of up to 45 percent. Roborock also mentions this model excels at keeping the mow even when dealing with odd terrain, thanks to the floating cutting deck that adjusts automatically. Plus, Roborock found it’s capable of climbing over obstacles like tree roots or paving stones that measure up to 1.57 inches tall. The large diameter wheels also help with its ability to handle any terrain.
Toys, sticks, and tree roots should be no issue for the RockNeo.
Credit: Roborock
It also comes with real-time obstacle avoidance. If the kids leave toys in the yard or the dog prefers to take all tennis balls to a weird spot, the RockNeo Q110H will avoid mowing over any items left behind. You can also choose specific areas of your yard to create multi-zone management. Keep the front lawn cut short for looks while letting the back get a bit longer for a bit more cushion underfoot this summer. You can also select your desired cutting height.
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The Roborock RockNeo Q110H comes with an IPX6 waterproof rating, so a bit of rain won’t do damage. When the robot detects rain, it’ll automatically return to the charging station, ready to resume mowing when the weather improves.
A worthy app companion
The Roborock app for robot vacuums is excellent, and the robot lawn mower follows suit. From the app, you can set a desired mowing schedule, set zones within your yard, and select cutting height. You can also take a glance at real-time mowing progress to see which areas have been completed and what the mower is currently cutting. This screen also shows remaining battery life.
Use the Roborock app to set mowing schedules and view real-time progress.
Credit: Roborock
When it comes to mapping, the Roborock uses full‐band RTK and VSLAM. Together, the robot should be able to keep its navigation wits steady without getting lost while mowing under trees.
If you’re considering making the upgrade to a robot lawn mower this summer, the new Roborock RockNeo Q110H could be an excellent pick. Grab it while it’s on sale for its introductory launch in the U.S. through June 16. No need to wait for Prime Day on June 23 to get this one on sale.
Entertainment
New safety rules for under-16 Snapchat users
Snapchat is rolling out new content-sharing protections for 13- to 15-year-old users.
The platform announced Wednesday that younger teens will get a “friends-only” experience for their Spotlight posts. That public feed consists of vertical videos short-form similar to Instagram Reels or TikTok.
The new rules make Spotlight content posted by 13- to 15-year-olds visible only to the user’s mutually accepted friends. Previously, under-16 users could post to Spotlight, without attribution to their profile.
“This allowed teens to participate, while helping to protect them from potentially unwanted contact that can come with public posting,” the Snap Company said in its announcement.
Under-16 Snapchat users will have a dedicated profile space for certain content.
Credit: Courtesy Snapchat
Now younger Snapchatters will get a space on their profile for creating, saving, and sharing Stories and Spotlight Videos with only their mutually accepted friends. Teens ages 16 and 17 can share content publicly with some safeguards.
“This new experience is designed to encourage creativity and self-expression within a trusted audience,” the company said.
Age checking on Snapchat
Currently, Snapchat relies on self-attested age and age inference, but safety advocates generally say social media platforms need high-quality age assurance to ensure their safety measures are effective.
When Mashable tested Snapchat’s age attestation prior to the announcement, we found that Snapchat defaulted user age to 18 years old.
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With the new policy, if Snapchat determines a user is under 16, despite their stated age, that minor will be shifted into the friends-only sharing setting. That change will appear in the Snapchat app if they choose to post a Spotlight video.
Snapchat safety concerns
Last week, the advocacy groups Heat Initiative, Anxious Generation, ParentsTogether Action, and Design It 4 Us published the results of a survey of teen Snapchat users, alleging that the platform’s safety measures aren’t effective enough.
A third of the poll’s 1,016 respondents said they’d seen or received unsafe content or messages in the past week. More than half said they’d had at least one such experience in the past year.
The top three types of dangerous experiences reported by up to a third of teens were unwanted contact, bullying, and sexually suggestive content and messages. More than 40 percent of respondents who’d received unwanted messages believed the sender was an adult.
A Snap Company spokesperson told Mashable that the report “does not fully reflect the significant investments Snap has made to help protect young people.”
In the blog post Snap published Wednesday, the company noted that it works to prevent the delivery of friend requests from potential strangers, and that the platform doesn’t allow teens to be messaged by anyone they haven’t added as a friend or who’s not in their phone contacts. Additionally, when teens accept a stranger as a friend, Snapchat is designed to send warnings when minors begin chatting with that user.
“After years of advocacy by parents, kids, and experts, it’s encouraging that Snap is finally making some changes to try to prevent young children from posting in adult spaces, which has put kids in danger on the platform for years,” Brooke Istook, president and chief strategy officer at Heat Initiative, said in a statement to Mashable.
Istook added, however, that “fundamental dangers for kids that are baked into Snapchat’s design” remain unaddressed, including the facilitation of unsafe connections between teens and adults and the algorithmic recommendation of unsafe content.
Snapchat has been the target of youth safety activism and the target of legal action, like many major social media platforms. In January, Snap settled a lawsuit brought by a teenager who claimed that Snapchat’s design features, like algorithmic recommendations, led to addictive use and mental health harms. Soon after, Snap introduced new parental controls for teens.
UPDATE: Jun. 10, 2026, 8:27 a.m. PDT This story has been updated to include a statement from Heat Initiative.
Entertainment
Using Claude Fable 5 means your data will be collected. It’s not optional.
Anthropic just released its most powerful public model yet — Claude Fable 5. However, along with the model’s release, the AI giant also made a significant update to its data retention policies.
Fable 5 was released to the public on Tuesday. Fable 5 is a “safe for general use” version of Anthropic’s most powerful model, Mythos, which has been restricted from public use due to its potentially dangerous cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic created a set of safety guardrails for Fable 5, and its benchmarks blow away much of the competition, per Anthropic.
But it looks like Anthropic has also blown away its data retention policies for Fable 5.
“To ensure we’re responsibly deploying Mythos-class models, we are requiring limited data retention and review as part of our safety work,” reads an update on Anthropic’s official Claude support page. “Prompts submitted to, and outputs generated by, Mythos-class models are retained for 30 days for trust and safety purposes, on every platform where these models are offered.”
The update was first noticed by Jun Park, the CEO of AI training company hillclimb.
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“New policy from Anthropic: if you use Fable/Mythos, they collect your data. No exceptions. Not even for enterprise partners,” Park posted on X.
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This change is significant for Anthropic’s enterprise and API customers, says Jessica Eaves Mathews, a lawyer who specializes in copyright, trademark, and AI law.
In a post on Mathews’ Substack (as highlighted by CyberNews), the lawyer explains how Anthropic already retains user data for 30 days under its free and paid consumer plans. However, Matthews says this change nullifies part of any agreement Anthropic has with its enterprise and API partners.
“Every other Claude model available through the API, including Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6, and Haiku 4.5, can operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements,” Mathews writes. “Fable 5 cannot. If your organization previously had a ZDR agreement with Anthropic, that agreement does not apply to Fable 5 traffic. This is a policy change that overrides existing enterprise commitments for this specific model class.”
Mathews says that any organization that believed that their data would not be stored by Anthropic should know that there is now a “mandatory exception” for Fable 5 and all future Mythos models.
While Mythos-class models seem to be quite powerful, companies should know about the change in Anthropic’s data retention policies and make adjustments where necessary.
The Roborock RockNeo Q110H robot lawn mower just landed at Amazon, and its on sale for just 1 week
Yankees, Guardians bring worn-down bullpens into series finale
