We had a splendid time celebrating 50 days until Greenwood Trails and now, it’s time to start mentally preparing your camper for their time at camp.
Chris Thurber wrote this great article for first time camper parents.
Preventable Suffering
Turner, the Junior Division Head, had been sitting with eleven-year-old Robin at the foot of the big elm tree for nearly an hour. He’d pleaded with Robin to give camp a try, begged him to return to the kickball game — now in its final inning — and promised to be Robin’s buddy at afternoon swim. No surprise that the intensity of Robin’s homesickness had only become greater and his resolve to return home stronger. No surprise, because Turner had never received specific training in coaching homesick campers, Robin had never received specific training in coping with normal feelings of homesickness, and Robin’s parents had never been advised on the best ways to prepare him for camp. In fact, their parting words on opening day were, “Don’t worry, sweetheart. If you feel homesick, we’ll come and get you.”
The bad news: Protracted conversations, counterproductive advice, pick-up deals, and emotional suffering are common at camps around the world. The good news: It’s all preventable. A well-designed prevention program can reduce the intensity of first-year campers’ homesickness by 50 percent or more, virtually eliminate parent pick-up deals, and give staff the tools they need to provide prompt, sensitive, and effective support.
Prevention Science
What is “a well-designed prevention program?” First of all, it’s a program that happens before opening day. Anything that happens after opening day, such as sitting down and coaching a homesick camper, is treatment. Treatment is important, and your staff should know how to recognize and treat homesickness, but 70 percent of what causes homesickness exists before camp starts. Homesickness risk factors include:
little previous experience away from home, including little or no previous camp experience
negative attitudes about camp and the separation from home, including feeling forced to go to camp
high levels of parental anxiety expressed to prospective campers, including ambivalent statements such as, “Have a great time at camp. I don’t know what I’ll do without you”
expectations of intense homesickness, based partly on insufficient understanding of the most effective ways to cope with normal feelings of missing home
insecure attachment, meaning uncertainty about how reliably and positively adult caregivers will behave, especially in times of need
The next thing a well-designed prevention program does is address all of these risk factors, preferably in multiple, entertaining ways. Thus, it may include:
advice on practice time away from home, such as spending the weekend (without parents) at a relative’s house
camp orientation materials, including colorful images of a typical day and a copy of the daily schedule
coaching for parents on the best ways to involve their child in the decision to attend camp, as well as in camp preparation, such as shopping and packing
coaching for parents on the best ways to prepare their child emotionally for the separation from home, including not making pick-up deals and sharing anxiety only with other adults
educating children about the normalcy of missing home and teaching them the most effective coping strategies for in-camp homesickness
providing information about the caring camp culture and all the ways your staff provide warm supports and exciting opportunities
If provided in a succinct, educational package, a well-designed prevention program works to promote adjustment and minimize homesickness intensity because it:
bolsters confidence, through experiential learning (e.g., practice time away from home)
reduces anxiety, through novelty reduction (e.g., orientation about living at camp)
increases competence, through skill acquisition (e.g., how to cope with homesickness)
supports families, through personal attention (e.g., coaching parents and children about camp culture)
enhances positive attitudes, through illustration (e.g., showing how much fun camp is)
boosts feelings of control, through participation (e.g., choosing a camp together, as a family)
Predicting Homesickness
Homesickness prevention works because homesickness itself can be predicted. One can scientifically assess all of the risk factors a given child has, such as negative expectations about camp and little previous experience away from home, but the single most accurate predictors are children themselves. If you ask children, one month prior to camp, to guess the intensity of their in-camp homesickness on a scale from 0 to 10, they come within a point or two of their actual average two-week intensity!
That may seem remarkable, until you realize what a powerful effect attitudes have on emotions. Quite simply, children and adolescents who believe they will become severely homesick will often become severely homesick. Now take a step back and ask, “Why do young people believe they will become severely homesick in the first place?” It’s more complicated than the old “self- fulfilling prophecy” hypothesis.
Instead, the answer circles back to the familiar targets for prevention: control, confidence, coping, and contact. If one or more of these constructs lacks strength, the likelihood of intense homesickness increases. Children know when they lack coping skills; they perceive diminished control over their futures; they sense the absence of meaningful camp contact; and they feel their confidence drop. This is why they can so accurately predict their own future adjustment to separation.
Each of the constructs in Figure 1 re-quires precamp contact with new camper families. Each requires explicit instruction. When contact and instruction are absent, the results are inevitable. For example, I often receive summer consultation calls from exasperated camp directors who are looking for solutions to intractable cases of homesickness. By the time I get called, the director has already considered sending the camper home early. My first question is always: “Has a pick-up deal been made?” Once I know whether that camper’s parents have promised to pick him up if he felt homesick, I have a clearer sense of how to manage the case.
Pick-Up Deals
In cases where a pick-up deal has been made (and children tend to reveal this more candidly than sheepish parents do), there are two equally unsatisfactory alternatives:
Advise the parents to stick to their word and pick the child up early. The disadvantage here is that the child is robbed of the opportunity to complete his camp stay; or
Advise the parents to rescind their promise and insist the child stay at camp. The disadvantage here is that the child’s trust of his or her parents is eroded.
At this point, the camp director I’m talking with usually asks the question most people ask when faced with two crummy choices: “How could I have prevented this?” Specifically — and most congruent with a philosophy of partnering with parents — they ask the question: “What do I need to say to parents to get them to stop making pick-up deals?”
My answer is embarrassingly simple. “You just have to tell them not to make pick-up deals,” I insist, adding “Give them the rationale, of course, but do it all before opening day.” This straightforward approach makes sense to directors facing a crisis, but for anyone to adopt this approach now, during the off-season calm before the storm, requires surmounting two small psychological hurdles: (1) Overcoming the fear of broaching the topic of homesickness with families; and (2) Understanding the subtext of parents’ anxiety. Until camp directors overcome these two hurdles, they are destined to encounter multiple homesickness crises each summer.
Discussing Homesickness
In 1995, I conducted a study to address a concern that camp directors, parents, and even my doctoral dissertation committee (!) had about my research on homesickness. Wasn’t my asking campers to rate their daily homesickness intensity (along with the daily intensity of their happiness and other emotions) actually causing homesickness? To test this unlikely hypothesis, I compared three groups of several hundred children. Group 1 completed my Rate Your Day mood checklist just twice in two weeks; Group 2 completed it daily for 14 days; and Group 3 completed it daily for 28 days. The groups were equalized with respect to age range, experience with camp, and attitudes about camp.
The result: No differences in homesickness intensity. My conclusion: Discussing homesickness does not make it happen. To the contrary, talking about homesickness labels the feeling, normalizes it, and puts everyone in a better position to deal with it. I’m not suggesting that homesickness be the centerpiece of anyone’s conversations about camp. Ruminate about anything long enough, and it will put you in a funk. But I am suggesting that all camp professionals and new camper families deal directly with the issue in a mature, measured, rational fashion. Homesickness can no longer be the elephant in the room that everyone recognizes but fears mentioning.
As for understanding the subtext of parents’ anxiety, camp professionals must also come to a consensus that partnering with parents requires empathy. When parents respond to their children’s developmentally appropriate query “What if I feel homesick?” with the destructive promise “If you feel homesick, I’ll come and get you,” you need to amp up your empathy. You must understand that what the parents are actually saying is, “Junior, I have so little confidence in your ability to cope with this normal feeling that I think the only solution is for me to come and rescue you.” Nothing could more effectively undermine campers’ adjustment. And nothing could more clearly indicate intense parental anxiety. Once you see the anxious corner some parents inadvertently talk themselves (and their children) into, you’ll naturally be inclined to provide reassurance.
When we reassure nervous families that homesickness is normal and give them encouraging guidance on the best ways to prepare for the transition from camp to home, they listen. When we sensitively but explicitly counsel parents not to make pick-up deals, they resist the temptation. And when we measure the effects of a well-designed homesickness prevention program, the results are clear.
Yes! Prevention Works!
Homesickness is painful, it interferes with having fun at camp, and it consumes more staff hours than any other single camper issue. Children who experience moderate or severe levels of homesickness are also less likely to return to your camp, so homesickness prevention is also smart business. (In the latest American Camp Association member survey, nearly 40 percent of camps say they have not reached enrollment capacity for years.) Fortunately for all camps — day or resident — prevention science works.
The camps that have adopted a multimodal approach to homesickness prevention all report happier campers, calmer parents, higher enrollment, better retention rates, and a highly competent and confident staff who spend much more time playing and leading than treating homesickness.
Yes, Treatment Counts, Too
Of course, role-playing homesickness treatment techniques remains a staple of staff training week. A well-trained staff is part of an effective prevention program because their work with campers after opening day often prevents mild homesickness from worsening. But well-designed prevention programs that reach families long before opening day will make melodramas like Turner and Robin’s a thing of the past.
Someday, each one of the millions of children who leave home for camp will do so confidently, knowing that missing home is normal, and they will be fully prepared to implement the most effective coping skills so that homesickness doesn’t interfere with the fun that you have worked so hard to design.
Lil Riccy has been busy pinning his favorite things to his new Pinterest boards! His boards are filled with everything summer camp from things to pack, arts and crafts ideas, gnome pictures, camp food, tents, and everything in between! Follow Little Riccy on Pinterest!
Let’s face it- Greenwood Trails is an awesome place to be! 2012 is going to be an amazing summer and we’re really excited to announce our newest activity to camp- Go Karts!
Yes, Lil Riccy has tested the Go Karts and he has given his gnome approval to the activity! So, get your courage on and get out to GWT to give our go-karts a whirl!
Greenwood Trails is different than other camps- the facility is huge and beautiful, the sense of community is amazing, our counselors are top notch, our activities are awesome… but one thing that is really different about our camp is our Pay It Forward program! At Greenwood Trails, we encourage our campers to get out in to their communities to serve one another and in return, we offer a discount to thank our campers for their hard work and their kind heart.
Today is National Pay It Forward Day! So today, (like any other day for our campers), we encourage everyone to think about someone else’s needs and to help those who ask for it, or even those who don’t ask for it!
There are lots of things to remember when packing for camp. Greenwood Trails campers pack flashlights, green and white clothing, a walking stick, a rain coat, toiletries and so many other things. But, one thing that we ask that you don’t bring to Greenwood Trails is a phone! There are many benefits for leaving technology behind and here’s a great article in the New York Times outlining why it’s important to have time connecting… human to human.
By Sherry Turkle
WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.
We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.
A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”
A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”
In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.
In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.
Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.
Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.
We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.
Mark your calendars! May 11 is right around the corner! And you know what that means?! Yes- you guessed it! 50 days til camp!!
Here are some great ideas to celebrating the best holiday ever:
Dress as a gnome
Show extra respect, integrity, care, and courage
Make scones for breakfast
Sing the O Lay Lay song
Wear GWT Gear
Devote your facebook and twitter to the best summer camp ever
Have a campfire, roast some marshmallows and do some ridiculous stunts
Have your own neighborhood green and white color war
Give friendship bracelets to your friends and teachers
Paint ninja
Brainstorm some talent show ideas
Make your own Green and White clothing to show off during GWT’s color war!
And most of all, have fun- because that’s what camp is all about, right??
A camp professional from the American Camp Association of New York and New Jersey, posted a great article about why summer camp fosters such meaningful friendships. Here is an excerpt:
Summer camp has always been a place where strong friendships have been made and sustained for years to come. In fact, The American Camp Association has found that 96% of campers say that camp helped them make new friends, while 92% indicated that other campers helped them to feel good about themselves. 69% of parents also mentioned that their child still remains in contact with friends made at camp. What is it about summer camp that helps foster friendships?
Greenwood Trails can help to answer this question! Our summer camp is committed to strengthening kids’ social skills. How do we do it? Well, for one- our staff is trained in team building exercises. We have an excellent low ropes course and programs for helping campers to overcome uncomfortable situations. On top of that, our camp is designed for fun fun fun! With lots of activities to choose from and lots of awesome evening programs, Greenwood Trails is always encouraging kids to make friends and to have fun while doing it!
Because of Camp. . .® The possibilities are endless
By Marcia Ellett
For almost 150 years the camp community has had a secret. Not a well-kept secret, mind you, because you can see it in your neighborhoods, in your office buildings, on your favorite TV shows — you can see it at sporting events and hear it on your radios. But just in case it’s still a secret to you, it’s time for the camp community to shout it from the rooftops. When your kids come home energized from their summer camp experiences with that confident, exuberant, knowing smile you’ve never quite seen before broad across their faces, it’s because camp has given them more than happy memories. Because of camp they’ll have lasting friendships, understand the value of empathy and compassion, know how to be a valuable and contributing member of a team, and have developed critical-thinking skills to stand them in good stead as future leaders and responsible, community-minded adults.
“Simply put, camp changes lives,” says Peg L. Smith, American Camp Association’s® (ACA’s) chief executive officer. “Camp, and the experience of camp, define us, even as adults. Camp has changed many lives, introduced people to new passions and broadened horizons.”
The proof is indeed everywhere.
Just ask Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug. Best known for landing a critical vault on one leg after injuring her ankle in the 1996 Olympics and helping to secure the gold medal for the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, Strug credits camp for teaching her how to be a team player.
Ask 18-year-old actress Emma Roberts, who took on the role of literary icon Nancy Drew, starred in the movie Hotel for Dogs released earlier this year, and is set to appear in a number of other films in the coming months. For some in her position, it might be difficult to stay grounded, but, she says, “Because of camp I learned to make lasting friendships with people I still keep in touch with today.”
Ask professor and Emmy award-winning journalist Frank Sesno. His work for news giant CNN has taken him around the globe and given him the opportunity to interview dignitaries including four American Presidents, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. But it was at camp as a boy, he says, that he “learned to navigate the world.”
Ask singer and songwriter Lisa Loeb, who says, “Because of camp, I play guitar.” And with her guitar and acoustic melodies in tow, she went on to garner a No. 1 single, gold records, and Grammy nominations. In fact, she was so inspired by camp that she released a children’s CD of camps songs in 2008 titled Camp Lisa and launched the Camp Lisa Foundation to help raise money to send kids to camp.
Or, ask actor and author Hill Harper, who currently stars on TV’s CSI: NY. He says, “Because of camp, I learned about self-esteem.” He poured that crucial lesson into Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny, a book of advice for teens that won the American Library Association’s 2007 prize for Best Book for Young Adults.
While not everyone who goes to camp will end up famous, everyone who goes to camp can learn the life skills and find the fortitude needed to follow their dreams. The secret is out: Camp changes lives. So here’s to every child having the opportunity to experience the wonders of camp. And to every adult echoing the words of actress Lisa Raye, who says, “Because of camp, I turned out just fine.”
Writer Marcia Ellett believes that because of camp and the encouragement she received there to spread her creative wings she found her voice and now enjoys writing about the camp triumphs of others.
