Teens need entertainment the way they need the air they breathe. Such attachment to entertainment is likely to become especially clear at times that you pull them out of their regular lives and get them to accompany on something like a camping trip. Far from their natural habitat, teens come to depend on you entirely to make their time worthwhile. You could find that more often than not, you aren’t up to the challenge. Your camping adventure isn’t going to be fun at all when your teens sulk the entire time about how none of it makes any sense.

What you need to do is to help save your teens from themselves. They may enjoy the whole trip: but only if you can help them stop obsessing about how boring all of it is.

To make it seem fun, arrange for friends to come along

Your kids may have each other on the trip, but this isn’t the kind of company that counts to them. If you can manage to arrange for each one of your kids to bring one friend on the trip, you’ll find that the whole thing goes much more smoothly. When a teen has a friend, they become a unit, and they get to play the us-vs.- the world role. While they are still going to hate the camping trip, they’ll have the satisfaction of hating it together. In the mind of a teen, it’s as close to happiness as it gets.

Never mind healthfulness and wholesomeness

Since a camping trip is supposed to be about a return to nature, it might occur to you to ask the kids to unplug and to eat healthy food. This isn’t a good idea. If you want your kids to go along, you don’t want to push them to accept too much all at once. Encourage your kids to bring their phones. Give them something like the Mandala coloring book app for grown-ups that is so popular today, or anything else that they may prefer. Also, give them plenty of fun food. You can either choose chocolate and junk food to bring from home or learn a few fun campfire recipes, ones like banana boats and campfire cones.

Find high-tech games to play

When you look at camping, you see a wonderful opportunity to get back to nature. When your kids look at it, all they see is sweat, insects, dirt, sticks and stones. To help your kids connect with nature, you’re going to have to make it a little more high-tech. A game like a GPS Treasure Hunt, for instance, can put a high-tech sheen on what is essentially poking around among rocks and trees. It’s a simple game — you hide something attractive like concert tickets or money somewhere and give the GPS coordinates to your kids. It’s their job to get to those coordinates and find the treasure.

Helping your kids have fun in the great outdoors is about making it palatable to them. A little teen psychology is all it takes.