Camp Fellowship
Preventing & Treating Homesickness
Promising your child you’ll bring them home if they don’t have a good time is the same as saying
“If you want to come home, here’s what to do: Don’t have a good time.”
“If you want to come home, here’s what to do: Don’t have a good time.”
- Almost all children, adolescents, and adults experience some degree of homesickness when they are apart from familiar people and environments.
- Health care professionals and camp professionals are in a unique position to assist families and campers in understanding the etiology, prevention, and treatment of homesickness.
- Leaving home is a universal developmental milestone.
- The level can be mild to severe.
- Children with homesickness usually present as being tearful and withdrawn. Other children might present atypically with externalizing behaviors such as fighting, swearing, or destroying property.
- Severe homesickness does not remit spontaneously after a few days. Although this may be true for mild cases of homesickness; severe homesickness typically worsens over time if left undiagnosed and untreated.
- Severe homesickness in children is associated with social problems, behavior problems, significant symptoms of depression and anxiety, coping deficits, and feelings of helplessness.
Risk Factors:
Experience: The more experience a child has spent away from home, the less home sickness a child will usually experience.
Attitude: The belief that homesickness will be strong, coupled with negative first impressions and low expectations for a new environment, is a powerful predictor of homesickness.
Personality:
Experience: The more experience a child has spent away from home, the less home sickness a child will usually experience.
Attitude: The belief that homesickness will be strong, coupled with negative first impressions and low expectations for a new environment, is a powerful predictor of homesickness.
Personality:
- An insecure attachment relationship with primary caregivers is the most common risk factor associated with homesickness.
- Children and adolescents with an anxious-ambivalent attachment style are likely to experience significant distress on separation from home.
- Anxious-ambivalent Attachment: A child with an anxious-ambivalent pattern of attachment will typically explore little in a strange situation, and is often wary of strangers, even when the parent is present. The child has felt separation anxiety when separated from the caregiver and has not felt reassured when the caregiver returned.
- If young people are unsure about how reliable or positive the primary caregivers will respond to their displays of distress, they may have mixed feelings about how worthy they are of other people’s love and attention.
- This uncertainty can engender great distress in new social settings with surrogate caregivers.
- Secure attachments, a proclivity to explore, and solid social skills, is associated with independence, all of which help young people adjust to a novel environment.
- Two other personality factors that increase the risk of homesickness are low perceived control (over life in general or the separation itself) and anxious or depressed feelings in the months before a separation.
- Most predictive of homesickness is low “decision control.” In other words, when parents force a young person to spend time away, that child or adolescent feels very little decision control. Consequently, he or she is more likely to feel homesick on separation.
- Other family factors that are weaker predictors of homesickness include caregivers who express anxiety or ambivalence about the separation (e.g., “Have a great time at camp. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”)
Prevention:
- Involve children, to the extent possible, in the decision to spend time away from home.
- Taking part in even the smallest decisions will increase perceptions of control. By contrast, feeling forced to leave home without input into the decision often increases homesickness intensity.
- Educate children. Young people should be told, “Almost everyone misses something about home when they are away.”
- Homesickness is normal. It means there are lots of things about home you love
- And the good news is that there are lots of things you can think and do to help make things better if homesickness bothers you.”
- Get to know people in the new environment. Having at least 1 familiar face—be it an adult or a peer—in a new place can diminish feelings of homesickness by augmenting social support and connections.
- Encourage children to make new friends and seek the support of trusted adults. Both kinds of connections ease the adjustment to a novel environment.
- Refrain from expressing anxious or ambivalent feelings about time away from home. Well-intentioned parents have often exacerbated homesickness with comments such as, “I sure hope the food there is decent,” “I hope you’ll be okay,” or “Have a wonderful time. I hope I remember to feed your dog.” Giving children something to worry about will increase the likelihood of their having preoccupying thoughts of home. Ideally, parents should express enthusiasm and optimism about the separation and the novel environment. They should be counseled to share their own separation anxiety with other parents, not with their children.
- Maintain predictability and perspective about the time away. Use a wall calendar to show children the time between today and the day of the separation. Highlight which days or weeks the child will be away, so he or she can see that it is a discrete period, not an eternity. During the separation, calendars are also useful tools for helping children keep a perspective on duration.
- Surrogate caregivers (e.g., camp counselors, nurses, resident advisors) should be educated about the symptoms of homesickness and the most effective treatments.
Treatment:
Avoid the following strategies:
- Do something fun, such as play with friends, to forget about homesick feelings (distraction and social connection). KEEP THE CAMPERS BUSY!
- Do something (write a letter, look at a family picture) to feel closer to home.
- Go see someone who can talk with you to help you feel better (social support). Let the camper talk about his or her feelings without dwelling too long on them.
- Think about the good side of things (activities, friends) to feel better (optimism).
- Think that time away is actually pretty short to make time go by faster (perspective).
- Try not to think about home and loved ones to forget about homesickness, i.e. don’t be a “worry wart” (cognitive avoidance, persistent and uncontrollable worry).
- Think about loved ones to figure out what they would say to help (vicarious social support).
- Bring your favorite stuffed animal and blanket.
- Keeping a journal is therapeutic.
Avoid the following strategies:
- Doing nothing because of a belief that nothing would help make things better (relinquished control).
- Wishful thinking, such as wishing that camp would end tomorrow (fantasy).
- Doing something angry or mean to get sent home (aggressive or delinquent behavior).
- Trying to get home (escape).
- Telephone calls, and instant messaging, exacerbate homesickness during relatively short stays away from home (e.g., 4 weeks or less). Such contact will only increase the distress for both parties
No Deal:
- Under no circumstances should parents ever make a “pick-up deal” with their son or daughter - Promising that “if you don’t like it, I’ll come pick you up” reduces the child’s likelihood of success for several reasons.
- First, the subtext of such deals is “I have so little confidence in your ability to cope with this normal response to separation that I believe the only solution is for me to rescue you.” Such expressions of anxiety and doubt contradict the recommended expressions of optimism and confidence outlined above.
- Second, such deals plant the seeds of homesickness by giving young people the expectation that they will not like the new place. Negative separation attitudes are powerful predictors of homesickness.
- Third, such deals prevent the development of effective coping by pointing young people toward an escape route.
- Fourth, such deals paralyze surrogate caregivers who, after enthusiastic support and coaching, may be faced with a child who says, “My parents said that if I didn’t like it here, they would come to get me.”
- Parents are then faced with 2 equally unsatisfactory choices: (1) fulfill their promise, pick the child up, and deprive him or her of a wonderful opportunity to grow and develop; or (2) renege on their promise and suffer an erosion of trust in their relationship with the child.