Is it a good idea to communicate with your child at camp?

[This post was originally published at Forbes.com on the 11th July 2012]

For the first time ever, all three of our children (13, 11 and 7 years) are away at Summer Camp. Fortunately, they are all at the same camp which saves us considerable bureaucracy and also provided some comfort that they might be there for each other.

Images from our first Summer Art Camp of the year, "Wild and Wacky Portraits" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, near as I can tell our children would prefer to have nothing with each other while at camp. To say that this experience is liberating for us, as parents, is an understatement. We seem to have been transported back to a calmer time and have constantly had to challenge our usual behaviours of intense planning and tight scheduling. Things are very, very relaxed.

Suffice it to say, this was enough to spur our kids to grudgingly make contact with us. The 7 year old was the most enthusiastic and seems to send a letter a day. Her first one said: “Dear Mum and Dad, I miss you very much so I want to stay 4 weeks.” She was signed up for just 2 weeks. While the logic of her argument was flawed, as it turned out our lives were very different without her, so we promptly agreed to the extension.I believe that the same sense of liberation is going on for our kids. We are fairly strict parents and certainly on one key dimension — food — very strict. Camp provides a menu that is supposedly healthy but, in fact, is much more kid-friendly than our children’s usual fare. For instance, they appear to have dessert; a concept our kids dream about. At camp they get it every day. The also have something called ‘tuck’ that allows them to get special treats twice a week. But ‘tuck’ comes with a condition — no letter home, no tuck.

Our eldest wrote a varying set of sentences that were not so much designed to convey information but to be written neatly and cover exactly two pages with neat handwriting. We learned from that letter that the tuck letter writing requirement was a two page letter precisely because she ended the second page mid-sentence and did not even bother to sign the letter. We will likely receive the rest as the two page requirement for another instalment.

Our 11 year old son was the only one to convey actual information including his slow evolution of thought about staying on for two more weeks. He has decided to do so.

Alas, the tuck incentive has led to an imperfect flow of information from our children to us. But, in many respects, that is what the Camp wants. Every detail can be seized upon by parents and it is a thankless task.

But what about the flow of information in the other direction. Our Camp uses a service called Bunk1. That service gives parents the opportunity to pay in order to write emails that are printed out and delivered to children. It isn’t cheap and it requires being at a computer to use (I guess you could do it on a phone but it is hard). According to this Time article about ‘kid sick’ parents, Bunk1 was founded by Ari Ackerman to provide a “one way window” into the Camp world. With these emails I guess we can throw things through that window.

What do you write to a child on camp? Our main news is all the wonderful things we, as parents, have been able to do while they were at camp. They might be interested but my guess is that they are not. But given how much we are paying I feel we need to fill in the lines. So, with my son, I decided to just make stuff up. Basically, he receives an email from me every couple of days with an ever-increasing sinister plot that is unravelling. It started with the disappearance of our pet hamster (she’s fine) and then led to the disappearance of all of the pets of children who had gone to camp around Northern Toronto. Some pets have shown up at kids camps but then there was the Higgs Boson and heatwave melded into the story. Frankly, I don’t know where this is all going and now I have to extend it out for another two weeks and then bring it all to some resolution. This is a dangerous game indeed. I think this evening the hamster will reappear at home but just a little different. And of course, given that this is a one way affair I have no idea how this is being consumed at the other end. A dangerous game indeed.

Anyhow, Bunk1 don’t just rest with emails. You can also send your kids puzzles (Sudoku etc) and then you can view pictures that the Camp posts on the Bunk1 site. There are hundreds of these and, basically, what you do as a parent is sift through them to see pictures of your own children. For the first day of pictures we found our youngest and she was never smiling. This was a bit of a worry. But later on she seemed happier. Of course, this may all just be camp censorship. Who knows?

The Time article suggests parents obsess over this. We aren’t quite doing that but because it is there we do look. What is true, however, is that Bunk1 has tapped into a missing market for parent camp communication. I’m not sure I’d want a cheaper option as that might only encourage more communication. What we have here is more than enough.