Why are people so loyal to their sleepaway camps?   What exactly happens at camp that makes people rhapsodize about the experience thirty or forty years later?  Whenever I tell people that I am curious about the camping experience, the stories start to pour out.  “I loved my camp,” they say in a dreamy voice.  “A camp prize is better than any other award in life,” passionately declared a newspaperman at a dinner party.  He had won a bunch of journalism awards.  Apparently none of these trophies held the emotional power of that camp sweater that he still keeps in a drawer.

What is it about the summer camp experience—just a few weeks away for perhaps two or three seasons—that goes so deep under their skin?  Not many people rave about their schools or neighborhood the way they talk about camp. As a psychologist I am curious about the mystery of camp.  What’s the magic ingredient?

An alum of a YMCA camp in the Berkshires insisted, “It’s the cabin chat.  No other camp has the cabin chat.  It’s an amazing experience.” So I traveled to that camp and sat in on one cabin chat with eleven-year-old boys and another with fourteen-year-old girls.  In the total darkness the counselor would strike a match, light a candle and lead a discussion.  By candlelight the campers would take turns talking about their day, their feelings, and their thoughts on a philosophical question posed by the counselor. It was pretty powerful; in the moment it felt close to sacred. Indeed, two-thirds of the counselors there told me that they had more powerful feelings about their camp than they did about their family’s religion.

Yet kids from other camps that don’t have a cabin chat every night may feel just as strongly about their camp.  At a canoe-tripping camp in Ontario they tell me the secret ingredient is being out in the wilderness and paddling all day; at a general camp in Vermont they tell me it is the close relationships between staff and kids, and of course the singing in the dining hall each night.  At an arts camp in Connecticut they tell me the magic is self expression and the freedom that each child has to choose activities.

What is the magic of  camp? After a whole summer of sitting in on campfires, cabin chats, and dining hall sing-alongs, after laughing through a lot of silly campfire skits, after watching kids compete in color wars and canoeing contests and stage first-rate productions of Broadway musicals, I’m closer to an answer.

First, it is absolutely magical for kids to be away from their parents.  The sweetest, most satisfying moments of childhood (think back to your own life) are almost always when you are away from your parents.  Why?  Because as a child you see yourself constantly in the mirror of your parents’ eyes; you judge yourself by their words, their smiles, their eyebrows.  You cannot escape the power of your parents’ faces and judgments.  At camp, you aren’t getting any parental feedback, not for weeks a time.  What a great change!  Apparently, there is a little Harry Potter in every child, yearning to be an orphan, at least for a while.  Children are suddenly free to experience themselves anew; they face challenges and accomplishments that are theirs alone, experiences that don’t have to be run through the parental cognitive-ruminative-metabolic-judicial machinery.  It doesn’t matter what your parents think; it belongs to you.

Secondly, the relationship between campers and counselors is pure gold.  The younger kids love and admire the counselors and that respect brings out the best in nineteen, twenty and twenty-one-year-olds.  They are at their most responsible, compassionate and loving when they are put in charge of younger children and the younger children knock themselves out trying to impress these young demi-gods. I have seen many children hug young adults this summer and seen the young adults hug them back with genuine protectiveness and caring.  There isn’t enough mixing of half generations in our world.

Finally, if camps are successful, they create a private world with its own rules and rituals and magic.  Deep down, all children not only yearn to be Harry Potter, they want a Hogwarts; they want to have their own harrowing adventures with no (apparent) safety net.  Suburban life and school doesn’t provide children with much of an arena for adventure or their imaginations.  Camps have the ability to create that world that belongs only to a child and his or her friends. Now that is magic.

Six years ago I traveled up to Vermont to spend a week on a lake in the town of Salisbury. When I was there I re-discovered a fantastic lost world of family traditions. A world where people sit down and eat three meals together every day, serving their food from platters and talking with one another throughout the meal. A world where ten-year-olds set the table for dinner and take all the dishes back to the kitchen when the meal is finished, without complaint. A world where thirteen-year-old boys don’t play video games every night, nor do they watch TV or sit in front of computers. Instead, they lie on their beds and read comic books and graphic novels, sometimes even grown-up novels. In this world I saw eleven-year-old girls walking together and holding hands as they walked back to their cabins. Right out in the open. No girls there send mean instant messages to one another; they don’t I.M. at all. Instead, they sing. When they are making their beds (yes, they make their beds every morning) and sweeping out their rooms, they sing together. First one starts to sing a song, and then the others join in, spontaneously. There is no adult leading them.

As amazing as these phenomena are, they aren’t the most fantastic things that I witnessed in Vermont. I saw a world where nineteen and twenty-year-old young men spend hours of time swimming and diving and kayaking with eleven-year-old boys, and they all seem to enjoy it equally. When the swimming is over, the boys hang out with the young men and ask them questions. They also walked to dinner together, sometimes with the smaller boys hugging and hanging on the bigger boys, who don’t tease them or act annoyed. Even more amazing, at the end of each evening, the young men, the twenty-year-olds, sit with older men in their fifties and sixties and listen to them tell stories about their lives. They young ones aren’t sarcastic or dismissive the way that television sitcoms suggest they are supposed to be. They seem eager to learn from their elders, night after night. And at the end of the night, they all sing, boys and young men and old men, all together around a campfire.

But of course, this isn’t a fantastic lost world. As the reader has certainly guessed, it is summer camp that I am describing. My re-discovery of summer camp after nearly forty years of after being a camper myself, and my subsequent work as a camp consultant has led me want to write a book about children’s psychological experiences away from home because it is clear to me that when boys and girls go away from home they behave differently, they show parts of their personalities that they cannot show at home and they change developmentally, sometimes profoundly so.

It is because of the important developmental changes that occur at camp or overnight school trips  that I am writing “Homesick and Happy.” I am hopeful that I can help parents remember why it was so important for them to let their children go away.   There is a special kind of magic for children when they are on their own, away from mom and dad.   Do you remember it? Did you go to camp or go abroad for a semester when you were in high school? If so, I want to hear about your experiences. Please write me and tell me how your camp experiences affected your independence, your friendships, and your ability to tolerate risks? Did you became braver and more mature? Did you experiment sexually when you were away at camp? Did you use a different name at camp or experiment with being a different person?

I want to know what happened to you when you were away from your parents, and whether you are grateful for your experiences, whether you think they promoted your development as a person, or whether you are carrying around some scars. Let’s talk about it here on my blog. Please write to me.

Welcome to my blog: “Homesick and Happy”

What was the sweetest moment of your childhood?

…(Pause and think for a moment)

Were you away from your parents when it happened?

I bet that for most of you your parents weren’t there for the moment you remembered. That’s what people tell me. However, this generation of parents is having a hard time letting go of their children. I am writing a new book, “Homesick and Happy” about children’s experiences away from their parents, when they are at summer camps or years abroad, to remind parents that children grow and change when they are away from home.

In the coming months, I will be hosting a conversation on this blog about what it means to be “Homesick and Happy.”

Please join me.