I never had the opportunity to attend a summer camp until my freshman year of college when I got hired to work as a camp staffer and even as an adult I had the time of my life!
I learned a lot about myself and about kids during those ten weeks. There was no radio, no newspaper, and no TV and nobody missed any of it. Those kids were busy from sun-up to starlight with activities, games, hikes, swimming, and everything else under the sun. This was a rich camp for southern California kids and that camp had everything from motorcycles to surfing. The funny thing is that those rich kids needed camp as much, or more, than average kids.
The thing I found was most significant for rich kids about camp is that they had a young adult who went everywhere with them, did everything they did, listened to them chatter all day and even tucked them in at night. They ate up all the attention in fact one kid's mom called me to talk a couple of weeks after he left camp to invite me to visit on my day off because she said, he cried for two days after he left me but he has cried for two weeks after he left you! I visited them once in Beverly Hills, his mom even tried to hire me as a nanny, she wanted me to go to UCLA instead of where I was enrolled. I gracefully declined.
I remember one kid who was extremely homesick. I'll call him Matt because I don't recall his real name but Matt was about eight or nine. Matt cried every night uncontrollably because he was so homesick. We had a few every session who took some time to adjust but poor Matt was extreme. Finally after several nights of horrible, grieving crying I said to Matt, well let's go talk to the Director and see if you can go home. Matt turned to me amid great heaving snuffles and said plaintively, I can't go home, my maid's not there! I stifled my shock and gave him a hug and tucked him in for the night. Matt made it by the way, he overcame the homesickness eventually.
Summer camp is magical, it is eating in a noisy cafeteria, living with crazy camp staff, sleeping outside on the ground, hiking all day through frog-infested creeks, losing your clothing and wearing your buddies socks, it is cooking over open fires and singing loud and playing roles in crazy skits for laughs, it is group showering and sneaking out to raid the girls cabins. Summer camp is what every childhood summer should be, free and joyous and filled with fun and scrapes and giggles and few rules except to b e a kid.

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