The New Yorker:

There will be time to sort out whether the tragedy could have been averted, but the devastation is still unfolding, and it is already unfathomable.

By Jessica Winter

The sleepaway camp where my ten-year-old daughter will live for a month this summer forbids phone calls for the first six days, except for emergencies. Then the kids get one brief call at an appointed time, once a week. That’s also about how often the camp sends photos, in which your child may or may not appear. (I comb through these like they’re a lost roll from Dealey Plaza: there’s Badge Man, there’s Babushka Lady, there’s my kid.) No personal devices—cellphones, iPads, G.P.S. trackers—are allowed. Instead, my daughter and I exchange handwritten letters. Last year, I had started to think she was having too much fun to write home, but, in fact, she’d written five letters in seven days, and they all arrived at once.

I’m grateful for our camp’s restrictive communication policies, and I know that many other sleepaway camps take a similar approach. Kids should be free to throw themselves into the stuff of camp—swimming, hiking, crafts, singalongs, stage performances, playing “froccer”—without getting tangled up in the tethers of home. Sleepaway camp ideally feels like a world unto itself, a secret witchy ritual in the woods, at once wild and self-contained. By the time kids are old enough to take part, parents have had years of practice entrusting them to sitters, teachers, and other caregivers for many of their waking hours; entrusting those kids to what amounts to a temporary society unto itself is a big but logical next step. And although a parent may feel guilty or uncomfortable admitting it, it’s nice to cede all control of the child-rearing job for a few weeks, to have the chance to miss your kid. It’s nice, once in a while, not to have to think about her at all.

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