Away at camp, but not out of touch

For the third straight summer, Stacey Weiss will be sending her 11-year-old twin boys to Camp Echo in Burlingham, N.Y. But even though they’ll be away for eight weeks, Weiss can keep tabs on her children through photos on the camp website.

“I really love the website. It adds comfort to a parent when your child is away,” said the Woodcliff Lakes, N.J., resident, who will be logging on to the password-protected site to find out what her twins are up to this summer.

Over the last few years, a growing number of camps have tapped into the expertise of Internet start-up businesses for e-mail services, online videos and photos to help parents stay in touch with their children. Companies like Bunk1.com, Thriva LLC, Dial M for Mercury Inc. and Camp Channel Inc. say such tools are helping camps market themselves to parents at a time when anxiety about safety is high in the post-Sept. 11 era.

“Camps are looking more and more at technology as a means to assuage parents’ fear,” said Paul Fisher, president and chief executive of Dial M for Mercury Inc., which installs cameras to stream video to camps’ websites. This summer, it’s offering camp clients an Internet-based automated telephone messaging service.

Such services may be making parents more comfortable writing checks for summer camp. Deb Bialescki, senior researcher at Martinsville, Ind.-based American Camp Assn., reports a general rise in camp enrollment after the $20-billion industry suffered two consecutive summers of declines following the terrorist attacks in 2001. The trade association, which comprises 7,000 camp professionals, estimates an average increase in enrollment of 1% to 3% for the year over the same period of 2005.

This summer, Peg Smith, CEO of American Camp Assn., believes camps will eventually be supplying podcasts, downloadable audio files similar to radio programs. “That’s the next natural evolution,” she said.

Some camps operate their own websites, but many have turned to Internet companies with expertise in video formatting and other areas for better sound and visual quality. Ari Ackerman, founder and CEO of Bunk1.com, said some clients do their own videos, but send the company clips for formatting on the Web.

Companies like Bunk1.com offer systems to help parents send e-mail to the camps’ website for their children.

Although the technology allows parents to communicate with their children, it also might make some parents a little obsessive, poring over photos as they worry about their children, or trying to constantly stay in touch with their kids. Until the arrival of the Internet and cellphones, children tended to call home from camp only about once a week.

Christopher Thurber, a clinical psychologist at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., and a consultant to camp operators, said some camps now allow children to bring laptop computers and cellphones with them. That’s a bad idea, he said.

“Camps were originally created to provide a different experience than [children] receive the other 10 months of the year. The more technology you add, the less special ... the experience becomes,” Thurber said.

Weiss acknowledges that in the past, she tended to look obsessively at her children’s camp photos online. She’s getting better at not doing that.

“You can’t analyze over every single snapshot,” said Weiss. Still, she, along with her husband, Eric, plan to e-mail her sons, Benjamin and Alexander, each night while they’re away.

The new technology can make it harder for camp directors like Sandy Cohen of Eagle River, Wis.-based Camp Marimeta, which posts about 60 photos daily of campers on its website during the summer season.

“I get calls from parents who are concerned that their child didn’t look happy in the photos,” he said.