Write better, funnier, more interesting letters to your camper
Parents’ letters to camp can get a little, well, monotonous. If your letters are getting boring, you can always resort to creative stories of fires, hurricanes, pirate ships and daring rescues… See Rosie Hawthorn’s Kitchens Are Monkey Business blog.
Tip: Especially for younger children, you won’t want to cause concern, so make sure they know the stories are fictional.
Did you know that letters to camp is also about reassurance?
So much of the camper-parent experience is about reassurance. Reassuring your child that they will have fun, that being away can be a great learning experience, that you care even when they’re away, etc.
A few years ago, we learned about another important reassurance: that we’d be able to write to our child regardless of where we were. Two days after we dropped our daughter off at camp for the first time, we headed out for a vacation in Banff in the Canadian Rockies (a great vacation by the way). Luckily our hotel had a PC with Internet access that we used to send emails.
We knew we’d also be sending at least one postcard too, which seemed to have surprised our daughter who wrote back in huge 3-inch letters, “Oh My Gosh, I just got your postcard from Banff,” an exclamation that has taken its rightful place in our family lore.
The takeaway: even when you travel, make sure to reassure your child that you will still be able to write and that you’ll always be thinking of them when you can’t. And make sure to plan ahead – with paper/envelopes/stamps, addresses, and a connected PC at the ready.
Ah, letters to camp… Letter-writing is all about communication. And since I was a camper sometime way before 1990, things have changed… and how!
My loving parents used to pack us off to camp on a bus and that was the last they saw of us until visiting day over three weeks later. That’s just the way they did things back before 1990. Now parents can instantly send email, sometimes even receive email from campers, send and receive faxes (policies vary of course), see pictures of their campers, read blog posts, and even see videos! Check out Julie Kraut’s guest opinion in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for more thoughts.
Parents become experts at picking up little hints about their kids’ experience from posted phots and blog posts… who is she standing next to? Why isn’t he smiling? Why is the other kid in so many pictures when my kid is invisible? Problem is, we’re not really experts at deciphering this, and believe it or not, there really is no way to know what your child is experiencing. Heck, it can be hard enough to tell when your kid is standing right in front of you, let alone in a picture from camp (OK, I’m exaggerating a bit but you get the point).
This became even more clear for me recently when I visited a great camp that’s similar to my own kids’ camp. As I sat at dinner watching other kids happily sing songs, dance and engage in many special camp traditions, I realized just how few of the songs, dances and traditions I actually knew from my own kids’ camp. And because I didn’t go there as a camper, I realized that I will never be able to fully understand their camp experience as they do. But I can see that it’s OK for my kids to have their own special and unique experiences. Those experiences are just a part kids’ growth into independent individuals. When they choose to share, they will. And when they don’t, I’ll have to trust the highly capable people that run their camp.
Remember, camp is really all about your camper’s experience, not yours. The bottom line: for your child, the most important form of communication is the letter, email or fax that you send them.
What do letters to camp have to do with camp atmosphere?
As it turns out, plenty!
A great summer camp will work to create a specific type of atmosphere in camp. Many camps believe that summer is a time to disconnect from email, cell phones, etc. When sending letters, emails or faxes, remember that camps set their policies to reflect the atmosphere and values of the camp. In other words, expect that policies will vary widely from camp to camp.
I come across many camp websites that offer thoughtful suggestions and guidelines for letter-writing. For example, check out Camp Greystone in North Carolina. They also had great advice about birthdays too – see the last blog post.
Among other things, Camp Greystone advises parents to:
You can read more on their site. As you can tell from their tips, kids enjoy letters and letter-writing is an art that requires time and even planning. Of course, that’s why I started this blog – to help parents write great letters to their campers.
A final note on logistics. As I mentioned earlier, while most camps allow and encourage hand-written USPS mail (aka “snail mail”), email and fax policies vary widely between camps. Unlike Camp Greystone, most camps seems to allow email although many will charge extra for it. Make sure to check with your camp to ensure that you fully understand their policies.
For more tips, see last summer’s post on letter-writing advice .
The Letters to Camp blog is all about, well, letters and parent-camper communication. And from time to time, we’ll discuss related topics. Today we cover birthdays.
If your child has a birthday at camp, you’ll want to make it as special as possible while keeping to your camp’s rules.
Every camp is different (and most don’t seem to allow any sort of food for birthdays) but Camp Greystone in North Carolina offers some great birthday tips for parents that including letter-writing and cards. For example, they say that you should:
They ask parents not to:
…This is all outstanding advice. As a long time parent of campers whose birthdays fall during camp, I suggest that you also contact your camp to understand how they celebrate birthdays and what you are permitted to do. Each camp’s birthday observance will vary. Some camps celebrate the birthday on the day of the birthday while others will have a single celebration for all kids with birthdays during that session. At our camp, our kids are also allowed to call us on their birthdays.
You can help your child to have a great birthday at camp… Happy Birthday!
And so it begins – another great season of LETTERS TO CAMP! I just emailed my first letter of the year.
My fingers are anxiously awaiting the opportunity to type up the next email tomorrow! Only 44 more to go. But that’s OK because our daughter wants to know just how much we love and miss her EVERY SINGLE DAY. Not sure why, but she must also enjoy the mundane details that we tell her about too.
Actually this year is going to be a rather unusual: For starters, we can only send email to one of our two children – our daughter who is at a camp. Our son is traveling on a camp program so he can’t receive much email. Just the same, we’ll probably send an occasional email to his Yahoo! mail account.
But there’s more… as it turns out, my wife is yet another camp too. So she’ll have to send her email to me so I can add it to mine in order for us to keep to the one email per kid per day rule at our daughter’s camp. Sounds complicated? It is. I suggested alternating Mom and Dad writing days but everyone (except me of course) thought that was too confusing. But that’s OK because I ‘ll get ideas from the Letters to Camp blog (that you’re reading).
….So we won’t be writing any letters to them at camp for another…. 10 months. That 10 months may go by faster than I might think, so I had better start preparing now!
Oh, and yes, things are a little less quiet than they were before we picked them up on Thursday. But that’s OK – we like it this way, most of the time.
Letters to Camp 
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