I have only two memories of my first summer at sleep-away camp when I was 9: one from the first day and one from the last. I was not alone in finding sleep-away camp to be an escape, an opportunity for self-reinvention and an invitation to be messier, weirder and just more myself. It’s no surprise that coming home is, for many kids, such a painful transition that experts even have a name for it: campsickness. Shortly after I left my camp summers behind, I began to research the camp experience as an academic. After working with children at a camp in Michigan in the 1940s, he described the immersive nature of sleep-away camp as a “powerful drug” that could offer several potential benefits, including character training and “supportive mental hygiene.”

---

Persons: I’d, weirder, It’s, Fritz Redl, ” Locations: Austrian, Nazi Europe, United States, Michigan