Training Staff to Handle Homesickness Effectively

This is a guest post by Charlie Fletcher.

Summer camp is intended to be a fun and enriching experience for kids. There are opportunities for exploration, creativity, and personal growth. However, for about as long as camp has been a part of the cultural landscape, staff have had to help some kids handle a little homesickness.

While this is nothing new, our present challenges can exacerbate the issue. The COVID-19 pandemic in particular has seen kids unable to socialize as much over the last couple of years. Not to mention that they’ve spent a significant amount of time at home with their parents. As such, it’s not uncommon for kids to face separation anxiety and struggle in social situations away from home.

Obviously, you want your summer camp attendees to have the most positive experiences possible. You also have a duty of care to help when they are struggling. So, let’s take a fresh look at how you can train your staff to handle homesickness effectively.

Collaborating on Solutions

Simply dictating the practices to tackle homesickness is rarely your best approach. It’s important to think of your staff as a team of experienced professionals who each have insights to provide on the subject. You should approach planning your training as a collaboration.

It can be wise to approach this as a brainstorming session. This allows you to set the direction of the collaboration while facilitating contributions from your staff. To get the most out of a brainstorming meeting, you need to optimize the process through goals, structure, and supportive tools. Provide clarity that your primary aim is to devise solutions for homesickness. Set a loose agenda to go through the various aspects of your staff’s personal experiences. If your team is geographically disparate before camp, using online whiteboards can help them contribute remotely.

This approach helps everyone to feel involved in improving your camp kids’ welfare. From here you can start to create formal guides on solutions and practices you can distribute during later training sessions.

Maintaining Connections

Your homesickness training should have some focus on ways for staff to encourage connections with parents who don’t cross the line into over-reliance. Having kids write occasional letters to their parents can have an impact while also maintaining a healthy distance. But in our current digital age, letter writing is not quite as prevalent a part of children’s lives as it once was.

It’s worth giving your staff training on how to guide campers to communicate in this way. Often, it’s helpful to have staff talk to homesick kids about how letter writing may have helped them when they were young and at camp. Finding this common ground can also help forge strong connections that will be mutually positive through the camp experience.

However, you must train your staff to recognize the signs a child may need to talk to their parents or siblings to preserve their mental well-being. If a child has seriously disturbed sleep, becomes anxious, or isolates themselves, it’s good to facilitate contact.

There is a range of safe video calling tools for kids that maintain their privacy while online and limit the potential uninvited drop-ins by other parties. This is also a method kids have become used to following the pandemic and they may find it more comforting than a phone call. It’s important you also give staff training on how to provide support following a call so kids don’t become reliant on this method and disrupt their camp experience.

Handling the Emotions

One of the areas of homesickness camp staff can find challenging to handle is the emotions involved. This isn’t to say they don’t care about the kids or aren’t willing to respond to feelings. But so often the response is to find some form of band-aid to stick over the immediate problem rather than helping kids manage the underlying emotions involved. Giving training in this area can be key to looking after these homesick campers.

Provide education in areas that boost your staff’s emotional quotient (EQ). Developing a strong range of mental and empathic abilities not only helps staff to understand and manage their own emotions. It also gives them the tools they need to treat others with greater compassion while facilitating open and honest communication. They’ll also tend to gain insights into why campers may be having issues and find routes into discussing them.

Remember, the goal here is not to “cure” homesickness. But rather it’s to help kids navigate their valid feelings of loss, anxiety, and sadness (among others). Staff members who have the intellectual and emotional tools to actively listen to kids, acknowledge their pain, and perhaps share something of themselves are invaluable contributors to the camp experience.

Provide a Range of Tools

One of the huge advantages of the camp experience is the sheer range of activities you can introduce kids to. The way you train your staff to handle homesickness should reflect this. Help them to recognize they can utilize activities to address the issues homesick kids are going through.

Some camps approach this from the perspective of providing a distraction. But it can be more useful than this. Train your staff to look carefully at the feelings and challenges a child is experiencing and match an activity accordingly. For instance, a child’s homesickness may elicit frustration, anxiety, and restlessness. It can be helpful to channel the energy associated with this into creative pursuits and even physical, hands-on actions like sports and building projects.

In cases where kids are struggling with separation anxiety, loneliness, and feelings of abandonment, some team activities can be useful. Though you must teach staff to select these carefully. Make sure these kids are placed in teams with supportive members, perhaps with older camp attendees who may have had similar experiences in the past.

Conclusion

If your staff can’t handle homesickness effectively, this can derail a child’s experience of camp. Work with your counselors to find effective solutions and practices to allow kids to maintain healthy connections. Make sure staff take an emotionally intelligent approach while implementing the tools at their disposal to make a positive impact. This is a common problem in camp, but it can be addressed with kindness, empathy, and practical steps.

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Charlie Fletcher is a freelance writer passionate about workplace equity, and whose published works cover sociology, politics, business, education, health, and more.