Kids in Bunks, Parents in Funks
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The mom and dad were staggering up the street holding their daughter’s camp gear between them — a duffel bag seemingly stuffed with Pavarotti.
“This is the small bag,” the mom said through a gritted smile. They made their way through a throng of parents on upper Broadway, all bidding goodbye to children off to Camp Ramah, a sleepaway camp. Some of them were homesick already.
The parents, I mean. The new term for this is “childsickness.”
It’s not that parents never moped for their mosquito-bound moppets before. Of course they did. Then they went home, threw out all the junk under their children’s beds, and kicked up their heels till Visitors’ Day. But parents today — some of them, anyway — have become so accustomed to constant contact with their children (thank you, Verizon) that a summer hiatus feels less like a little break and more like a little breakdown.
“I cry for the next three weeks,” a father named Syd said as he prepared to put his daughter Jackie on the bus.
“He doesn’t,” the daughter, 11, reassured me.
“You don’t know!” the dad said. “I walk into your empty room. I’m lonely all summer.”
“He really isn’t,” the daughter reiterated, with a warning look at her dad.
To help Papa cope with her absence, Jackie keeps in touch as much as she can. “I write a lot, but Daddy wants me to write more,” she said. “I tell him everything I do — kind of. Just what I did that was fun. I don’t want to worry him.”
Dad looks grateful. He also looks like he could use a hug. Or a couple of electroshocks.
But maybe all he really needs is a little dose of pop psychology, so here goes. “If you aren’t truly ready, your child will know,” family therapist Bob Ditter writes in a handout the American Camp Association gives to parents. “And they won’t be able to go without being worried about you.”
So we have come to the point in American society where children have to soothe their parents’ separation anxiety. Next thing you know, they’re going to have to send care packages.
Or maybe not, since the camps already are taking care of that. More and more have started posting the addictive parental treat of daily, online camper snapshots.
“We promised our daughter $1 for every time we see her picture on the Web site,” the parent of an 11-year-old camper, Caryn Kboudi, said. This way, her daughter knows to look for the camera and make sure she gets her picture taken a lot. Meanwhile, mom can check the Web site 10 times a day — literally — to look for her.
Photo obsessing has become such a big deal that the adventure camp Sail Caribbean actually had to change its policy. “Last year we put up a lot of pictures and parents were calling our office to say, ‘Wait a minute! I didn’t see my kid!'” the camp’s marketing director, June Ingraham, said. “So now we put up what we call ‘representative shots’ — just five or six — so the parents don’t get nervous if they don’t see their child.”
While this has cut down on the calls to the office, that doesn’t mean that parents are settling for less info all around. Hardly. They want details. They’d prefer omniscience. “So now we’re forced to tell parents everything the kids have done in the last few days,” Ms. Ingraham said. “Like, ‘They sailed from Point A to Point B, they went on land, they took a hike, they got ice cream at a local shop, and stir fry for dinner. I mean, we put everything in there, so that parents can live vicariously through their children.”
And when that’s not enough, there’s direct contact. Bowing to parental pressure, this is the first summer the 29-year-old Sail Caribbean is allowing its campers to hang onto their cell phones.
This is too bad, since calling home often has the opposite effect anyone intended. Think of homesickness as a scrape. Eventually, it heals. But not if you keep peeling off the scab with a call to the people who love and miss you the most.
What makes camp so special — so intense, so forever vivid — is that it is the one place in childhood where the people who love and miss you the most aren’t. It’s where a child can finally be the person he or she longed to become, usually someone much more grown up than the person his or her parents know. My husband still marvels that in camp, as a sixth grader, he could be totally girl crazy. But back home it was another two years of neuterdom. Camp gave him liberation. Independence. And (I think) a girlfriend.
Over on Broadway, the parents with the huge duffel bag walked by again – this time with a sack so big it looked like they were smuggling a Smart Car. “It’s a sort of bureau,” the mom explained. “With drawers.”
Parents will always do more for their children than their children need. It’s called love. But if you want to give your kids the biggest gift of all, try this: For a few weeks this summer, leave them alone.
lskenazy@yahoo.com