Now that we’ve established in Part I that the real readiness question is are YOU ready, not is your kid ready, let’s talk about why that is and the number one thing that really helped me get over that hump of readiness.
Before my daughter went to her first international sleepaway camp at 9 years old, I have to admit I was nervous. Not about her really (I knew she was a fairly outgoing and resilient kid and would probably do fine), but about me. I’d never done this before. I’d never done the drop off at camp in Portugal (even though I’d done it a thousand times in Colorado.) I had no idea what her experience would be like, nor could I even picture it that well - I only had photos from the internet as clues. I couldn’t control it. All of the usual parent anxiety, doubly amplified by being in a new and unfamiliar country.
But, that all changed when I met the camp founder.
This wasn’t a formal interview. This was a conversation right at camp drop off where Joana, the Waves & Minds camp founder, made me feel so comfortable that I felt happy and confident saying to my daughter, “bye, will see you back here in a week!”.
What I got out of that conversation with Joana was a picture of who she was. What she believed in. Why she started this camp. What she is teaching/hoping the kids learn as they go through the week. Understanding her philosophy on kids and how they learn. Just a real 15 minute conversation between two people that gave me so much clarity and assurance that my kid was going to be ok there, and in fact, was going to love it.
That conversation changed everything. Not because of the words she said, but because I could feel whether she cared, whether she understood kids, whether her values aligned with mine. My overall nervousness didn’t disappear as I drove away, but it transformed into something actually useful in the moment: trust.
(Below is the totally uncut, unpolished version of the actual “formal Zoom interview” I did with her after coming back to the US, in case you’re curious. Feel free to skip around as I know it’s not short! )
Here’s what I realized: my daughter’s readiness to go to camp was never the bottleneck. My readiness to let her go was. And that readiness came from one thing — confidence in the people running it.
This is what most camp readiness frameworks get wrong. They focus on the kid: Can they handle homesickness? Will they make friends? Can they manage without mom? Will they like the food? Don’t get me wrong, those questions matter. But they’re not the actual limiting factor for most parents.
The limiting factor is us. And the way we get around that isn’t more research or more developmental benchmarks or more articles on what to pack. It’s actual connection - seeing who these people are, understanding their philosophy, getting a real sense of whether you trust them with your kid.
That’s the reason I started WanderWorks and am building a library of camp founder video interviews. Not to tell parents whether their kid is “ready,” for overnight camp in a foreign country, but to help them find camps in which they can trust the adults running them so they actually feel confident and comfortable enrolling their child.
Ok, that said, there are child-developmental pieces to this too, after all they are the ones going to camp. Your 8 year old sometimes does need different things than your 13 year old. The structure that works for one might not be the best for the other. And it’s worth understanding those shifts so you can get a good gauge on if a camp will fit or not.
But, do remember: those developmental differences are way less rigid than some checklist you get off of the internet. And for me, they’re way less important than actually trusting the founder and the people behind the camp.
In Part III (coming out next week), we’ll talk about what actually shifts as kids get older. It’s not a checklist for you to adhere to, but more of a lens for understanding your own kid and finding a camp that fits.