by Christopher Thurber, Ph.D.
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. Figure 1 illustrates how
these constructs combine to shape campers' attitudes about camp. 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!
Figure 2 shows a comparison between two groups of first-year campers.
One group received preparatory materials that included detailed information
about camp, education about homesickness, advice on the best coping
strategies, and suggestions about the best ways for families to prepare
for camp, including spending practice time away from home and not making
pick-up deals. The other group received no special preparatory materials.
In other respects, including age and experience, the campers in these
two groups were statistically similar. As Figure 2 makes clear, this
prevention program lowered the self-reported homesickness intensity
of first-year campers by 50 percent. In this study, the program cost
was about $10 per camper, making it not only highly effective, but
highly economical.
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.
Originally published in the 2006 May/June issue
of Camping Magazine. |
