The first time I went to sleepaway camp, I was 10 years old. When I returned home, a month later, my mom opened my footlocker to help me unpack. On top was a tray of my belongings—flashlight, lanyard, marksmanship badge, a few items of clothing, and a stack of letters my parents had mailed to me, many unopened. Beneath the tray were the rest of my clothes, neatly folded, undisturbed since the bag had been packed. I had been too busy having fun to change clothes or read letters.When my now-adult kids went to camp, I sent them daily emails. The camp printed these out for them, along with its own partially written return messages—templates for how to reply. Each day, a photographer posted to the camp website hundreds of images of children swimming, singing, and playing Frisbee. I scrolled and scrolled, “favoriting” the ones with my kids. When they knew their picture was being taken, they flashed a thumbs-up, our family’s agreed-upon code to signify that all was well. By the time they arrived home, I had put together a photo book with highlights of their summer.This summer, my young nephew went to sleepaway camp. At the start, parents were asked to complete forms about meal preferences and desired bedtime routines. Throughout, his parents received daily emails with photos exclusively of him. Camp photographers used facial-recognition software to ensure that parents would receive every image of their child.I tell this story across three generations because it captures a profound shift in camp life. Of course, some camps explicitly declare themselves tech-free zones, and some families seek out those experiences. But in many instances, summer camps—previously some of the last places a child could exist beyond the reach of their parents—have adopted a kind of surveillance apparatus in the name of information sharing and safety check-ins, turning camp into yet another environment where moms and dads can hover, ever present.For most of the 20th century, camps operated on a simple premise: Send your child and they will come back changed. The magical ingredient effecting that change was parental absence. Camp meant independence from home and school—and this was a feature, not a bug. Children without their parents were forced to navigate the world on their own. They learned to make friends without mediation (no play dates!), resolve conflicts without referees, and experience homesickness without rescue. But at many camps, all of that is being renegotiated.Photos taken using facial-recognition technology are but one indicator of this shift. Some camps now employ teams of full-time photographers who roam the grounds all day, documenting daily life. Parents form WhatsApp groups for their children’s bunks within hours of drop-off. Some send their children to camp with two phones: one to surrender at check-in, the other hidden, for calling home. Technology alone didn’t create this new relationship between parents and camp. But it has made it harder to preserve an essential ingredient of the old experience: distance.None of the changes to camp culture has happened because parents are suddenly worse parents. If anything, many moms and dads today are more emotionally invested in their children than ever. But some have also come to believe that good parenting means vigilance and continuous connection—which can have noticeable effects on kids’ sense of independence.Jolly Corley, a co-director of Camp Robindel, in New Hampshire, who has worked there since 1992, remembers when she first perceived the transformation. She didn’t observe it in the parents directly; she saw it in her camp counselors. Sometime between 2008 and 2010, she told me, kids started running to her office. “They were like, Counselors are being so mean. They won’t let us leave the cabin! And they were all upset,” she said. “I was like, Oh, here it is.” Young counselors who themselves had been raised by hypervigilant parents—with stranger-danger drills and supervised play dates—had never experienced the sort of freedom that they were now supposed to be giving their campers. They had to be taught what autonomy looked like.The more I spoke with camp directors, the more I came to understand how the rise of daily camp photography plays into these dynamics—and has reshaped parents’ perception of camp’s very purpose. Michael Marcus has been a co-owner of the boys-only Camp Greylock, in Massachusetts, since 1994. For years, he resisted posting photos. “When you have a photographer come around and the kids know that this picture is being taken, it takes them out of their moments,” he told me. And camp is supposed to be a “pure time for them”—something he was trying to preserve. At a certain point, however, all the camps around Greylock began posting photos. Marcus found himself, “like an idiot, standing on a soapbox explaining to the world why everybody else was wrong but me. That is not a particularly good position to be in.”So Marcus hired a photographer, and now Greylock posts 50 to 100 photos each day. Some camps, he said, post 500 to 1,000. A few influencer-run operations, with teams of videographers producing content, make summer camp look like a reality-TV show.Once posted, camp photos can take on a life of their own. They get scrutinized by parents who go looking for reassurance and instead find reasons to fret. “When you see a kid looking focused, they can also look concerned, or they could look worried or unsure of themselves,” Marcus said. And if that’s “the only photo you’ve seen of your son in three days, you might be worried.” Parents will call to ask if their child is sunburned, or if their kid wore the same shirt two days in a row. If four boys are photographed together and a fifth is shown standing two feet to the right, a parent might wonder, Is he being ostracized? “They can read into absolutely everything that’s natural,” Marcus said. “And unfortunately, ‘natural’ doesn’t seem to sell to parents, because everything in life is scripted and produced.”Diane Goldberg Marcus—Michael’s wife—co-directs Belvoir Terrace, a girls’ camp also in Massachusetts. She recently received an email from a parent alarmed by a photo of her daughter leaning over a painting in art class. The parent asked that the camp tell the girl to drop the class; she was worried about the child’s posture, afraid that she would hurt her neck. When Diane found the girl and asked her about the class, the camper was confused. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I love this class.”Parent chat groups have further blurred the boundary between home and camp. When a child appears in a photo, or doesn’t, word travels fast. “It’s not even the individual parent,” Michael Marcus told me. For people “trying not to pay attention, even those parents are bombarded by their friends. Every single age group has their own parent chat, and every bunk has a parent chat, and everybody talks about everything.”Many camp directors now spend a meaningful part of their summer tending not just to their campers but also to the separation anxiety of the adults who sent them—a phenomenon that the psychologist Michael Thompson calls “childsickness.”Parents once understood their own occasional absence from their kids’ lives as normal. Many now consider their presence normal and expected. If parents habitually track their children’s locations, attend every game and recital, and are always available by text, the experience of not knowing what’s happening with their kid can feel like a problem to be solved. “When you know what your child is doing every second of the day,” Michael Marcus said, “when they disappear, I truly believe that there’s a void that goes on in parents that is very hard for them to deal with.”Anxious interventions by parents don’t simply alter camp. They can alter children’s belief in their own capabilities. Corley told me that kids arriving at her camp are sometimes overwhelmed by simple challenges. “If you’ve never had to solve the problem,” she said, “you don’t even know the question you’re supposed to be asking.” Many also seem ill-equipped to manage their feelings, because they haven’t practiced this skill without parental oversight. “Parents are helping to do that,” she said. “I would say maybe they are doing it rather than helping. They’re regulating the emotions of the kids.”For more than 30 years, Derek Edwards has worked at Incarnation Camp, in Connecticut. He uses a phrase for what he witnesses on visiting day, when parents get to drop in and observe the goings-on: fishing for pain. Some parents arrive primed to interview their child about what might have gone wrong: Was someone unkind? Did someone exclude them? Edwards is careful to say that these moms and dads love their children fiercely and want what’s best for them. Still, he has watched parents arrive and, fueled by the emotions of seeing their child, begin looking for reasons to take them home. The kids, meanwhile, tend not to be bothered by whatever their parent has fixated on. “A lot of times,” he said, the child’s not “fussed.”My 19-year old daughter went to sleepaway camp for the first time when she was 8. She remembers crying at dinner during her first week and desperately wanting to go home. Her counselor sat with her, listened, and steadied her. My daughter stayed—and went back to camp every summer thereafter and loved it. Recently, I told her that I was working on this article and had heard that some camps now allow children to call home regularly. “That’s terrible!” she said. “If I’d been allowed to call home, I would have begged to leave.”In his book Homesick and Happy, Thompson argues that missing home is not a problem but a vital developmental milestone. Working through their homesickness, children develop a sense of self-assurance by realizing that they can be away from home, make friends, survive, and, ultimately, thrive. This builds a kind of confidence different from the type derived from academic achievement. It is the confidence of a young person who has discovered something about themselves.My daughter’s example demonstrates yet another benefit of parents’ backing off: allowing children to learn to rely on a broader community. The person who soothed my daughter’s 8-year-old tears was a counselor, and the experience taught her that when she was in distress, she didn’t necessarily need her parents. She just needed a sympathetic teenager, or an adult, to assure her that she could get through it. This is how children learn that people outside their family have their back, Isaac Saposnik, the executive director of Camp Havaya, in Pennsylvania, where my kids were campers, told me—people who “care about them enough” and who “can be trusted when things aren’t going well.”For many kids, despite the parental hovering, camp is still doing its job. Once, Corley told me, a tetherball got caught in a bush, and some kids at her camp who’d been there for three summers quickly set about trying to untangle it—going at it from different angles, standing on one another’s shoulders to reach a high branch. (“Had a parent seen that,” she said, “they’d be freaking out.”) Three years before this, the kids would have come running to her for help. Now “they were like, Well, we can do this ourselves.”An irony worth noting is that camp has become more important precisely because of the culture of hyperconnectivity. In a childhood rife with screens, highly curated schedules, and constant supervision, an extended stretch of relative freedom takes on even greater importance. “Without the screens,” Diane Goldberg Marcus told me, “the kids, every year, they have to relearn how to talk to each other.”When I think back on my footlocker—the unopened letters, the unworn clothes—I realize that I was too busy to attend to any of it because I was completely absorbed in a world that wasn’t home. I didn’t suffer from the lack of daily photos. And, as far as I know, my parents didn’t either. I was also learning valuable lessons: that I could be somewhere my parents knew very little about and still be fine, that places besides home were full of people worth knowing and experiences worth having, and that I could access these things on my own.My daughter knows this too. She learned it as an 8-year old, crying in a dining hall. Now she is grateful for that crying, and for the counselor who sat with her instead of handing her a phone. She wouldn’t trade that difficulty for anything, because on the other side of it was the discovery of who she was. That knowledge is no small thing. And for many people, it is the kind of knowledge they can build on only by being, for a while, truly away.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.