The central characters in "Bless the Beasts and Children" are six adolescent boys, whose preoccupied parents send them off to the Arizona Box Canyon Boys Camp for the summer. John Cotton (Barry Robins) leads this bunch of "misfits" who are all, to varying degrees, emotionally or psychologically disturbed. Cotton's group, composed of rejects and outcasts from the other cabins, is known as the "Bedwetters" and the boys are constantly demeaned and ridiculed, which inevitably crushes what little self-esteem they might otherwise have possessed in the first place.