Date Added: 15-02-2005

How do parents know when their child is emotionally ready to spend up to seven weeks away from home?
The answer, says psychologist Christopher Thurber, comes from a combination of factors: age, experience away from home and unsolicited interest on the part of the child. "Any parent will tell you maybe their 8-year-old is ready for overnight camp, but their 12-year-old isn't. Kids' personalities are different," says Thurber, school psychologist at New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy and co-author, with Jon Malinowski, of "The Summer Camp Handbook" (Independent Publishers, $14.95).

When children beg to go to camp, it's likely they are emotionally ready, says Thurber.

With summer camp application deadlines due in February or March, now is the time to make the determination.

Renee Flax, director of programs services at the American Camping Association's New York branch, in Manhattan, defines other important factors in making the sleepaway-camp decision.

"Parents need to realize that if a child has never visited an overnight camp, this concept is very difficult for them to get," says Flax, who recently presented camping-information sessions for parents and who advocates visiting summer camps a year before a child plans to attend.

"Even if they're asking to go, they don't really understand that they're not coming home at night, they don't have their own room, they don't have a refrigerator or a television they can go to anytime they want, so I think the first thing for a parent to do is to explain what an overnight camp is."

Flax also names other key factors that indicate a child's readiness: the ability to take care of basic needs (showering, hair-washing, getting dressed) and the confidence to act as his or her own advocate. "If they're in school and something happens that they really get upset about, will they not say something to a teacher or another child? Will they wait to come home and tell you about it and expect you to take care of it? Because issues are going to arise at camp."

One of those issues, experts agree, is homesickness -- a condition, says Thurber, that strikes up to 95 percent of campers. "Homesickness is a developmentally normative phenomenon. I mean, when you're away from home on a business trip, you miss some things about home, too. You're not devastated, you're probably not weeping in the corner, but you miss your family, you miss your bed at home or you miss your pets or you miss home cooking," he says. "The point is, it's normal, and therefore it's normal for kids to ask their parents something like, 'If I go to camp, what if I feel homesick?' "

Perhaps the worst thing parents can promise, says Thurber, is the "pick-up deal."

"The parental instinct is to say, 'If you feel homesick, I'll come and get you. Why make you suffer?' However, the subtext of that -- and this is the crippling thing about pick-up deals -- is, 'If you experience this normal phenomenon, I have so little confidence in your ability to cope on your own that I think the only solution is for me to come and rescue you,' " he says. "And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and kids become hypervigilant."

Flax agrees, referring to the pick-up promise as a fatal error on the part of the parents.

"You can be guaranteed that the child will never make it through camp," she says. "What you've basically let them know, in a very subtle way, is 'I don't think you can make it, so therefore, when this happens, I'm going to come get you.' "

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