For five long summers between the ages of 9 and 13, I went to sleepaway camp for two months in Maine. So did my brothers, my close friends, and my not-so-close friends. School let out in the middle of June and didn’t start again until the middle of September. To break up the long summer, everyone went to camp, or so it appeared to me.

There was the music camp (Interlochen), the tennis camp (Nick Bollettieri), the low-key camp for nice kids (Walt Whitman). But most people I know went to the sporty, all-around camps that dotted the states of New England. We rose each morning to revelry, played color war, swam in icy lakes, learned to water ski and sail, had competitions and socials with the nearby camps, cooked hot dogs and s’mores, and learned cheers and songs that I can still remember today.

Just writing about it makes me feel a certain warm nostalgia for those days. But truth be told, I hated camp. I cried when I got on the bus, cried when my parents left me each visiting day, and while other kids had long teary good-byes with their counselors and bunkmates at the end of the summer, I joyfully hopped on the bus and counted down the minutes until we pulled into the gritty, urban playground – New York City – that I called home.

Many of my friends today are gearing up to send their kids away to camp this summer – some gleefully and some with knots of dread in their stomachs. They’ve been to the Army/Navy shop, had the labels sewn in, and packed the trunks. All that’s left to do now is show up at the parking lot in Yonkers and deposit their kids.

When I talk with my friends, I wonder what I will want my own children to do in a few years, when they are old enough to go away to camp.

“One of my kids is counting down the days until camp begins,” said a friend of mine, “and the other will for sure be counting down the 52 days until it finishes. Maybe camp really isn’t for her, but it sure is good for me,” she added, looking forward to the hiatus from day-to-day parenting.

More of my friends, though, feel that seven or eight weeks away from home is too many, and they are grateful for the number of shorter options that exist.

More than 6 million children go to sleep away camp each summer in America, and it seems that today there is a camp suited perfectly for each one of them. There are specialty camps in more areas than I can possibly imagine – from fishing, baseball, rock climbing, and sailing to drama, gymnastics, computers, and robotics. There are several camps designed for children with special needs. And there are general sports camps for the competitive child, the noncompetitive child, and the somewhere-in-between child. Many camps come in two-, four-, six-, or eight-week allotments, allowing you to choose the length of time that best suits your child.

Is it really possible to watch a 20-minute video of a camp and be convinced that it is the right environment for your child? Of course not. Apparently there is a growing trend among parents to go camp-hunting the summer before their child is ready to make the big step. Isn’t that what you do when you’re looking at colleges a few years later?

I was shocked to hear a friend of mine distressed by the fact that she was sending her daughter to a camp that she herself hadn’t actually visited. “We just didn’t have a chance last summer to visit the camps,” she told me. “I’d feel much better about sending her away if I had an idea of what the camp looked like. But I know other kids who’ve been there, and they all seem to love it,” she added, more hopefully.

In fact, more than 90% of parents sending their children away have not visited the camp their children will be attending. And word of mouth is probably the best way to really get a sense of a camp.

When I hear my friends talk about their children going away, I can’t help but notice that more than 20 years later, not much has changed since I served my time. My close friend who lives in Westchester tells me that her daughter comes home each year from camp with a Long Island accent. There are no statistics on the migratory patterns of Long Island children to New England during the summer months, but I too remember being surrounded by girls from the Five Towns.

Campers are still forced to write letters home (you can’t come to the dining hall without a letter in hand), invariably sending a mile-long list of goodies that must be brought to them on visiting day, and all of them come home a foot taller, even if they’ve just been away for a month.

Camp is one of the great American childhood opportunities to reinvent yourself, gain newfound independence, and make whole sets of friendships that last from summer to summer, and beyond. One of our tasks as parents raising our children in New York is to make sure our kids receive several different doses of reality. For those of us whose children attend kindergarten with many of the same children with whom they will share a graduation podium some 13 years later, this kind of opportunity is golden.