I have only two memories of my first summer at sleep-away camp when I was 9: one from the first day and one from the last. On the first night, I cried from homesickness as an Israeli counselor consoled me until I fell asleep. On the last day, I cried as my father walked toward me — not because I’d missed him (sorry, Dad) but because I knew that his arrival represented the return to real life.

I went on to spend 14 summers at camp, first as a camper and then as a staff member, and I learned that within circles of passionate camp kids, my emotional response to camp’s conclusion that first year was not unusual or extreme. What happened that summer between my two memories might be a blur, but I know I was happy the whole time in a way I rarely was at home. I was bullied at school and had a mom debilitated by multiple sclerosis, and my parents had just gotten divorced. At camp, I made friends easily, found meaning in my Jewishness and happily ignored the problems that awaited me come late August.

I was not alone in finding sleep-away camp to be an escape, an opportunity for self-reinvention and an invitation to be messier, weirder and just more myself. It’s no surprise that coming home is, for many kids, such a painful transition that experts even have a name for it: campsickness. There’s plenty of advice available for parents on how to cope with this often messy end-of-summer transition, such as doing camp activities at home and exercising an abundance of patience as your child resumes routines. But this advice, however useful, misses the point. Camp is supposed to feel different from — and, frankly, better than — home. That’s what gives camp its life-changing power.

Shortly after I left my camp summers behind, I began to research the camp experience as an academic. The best description I’ve come across for how camp affects kids comes from Fritz Redl, an Austrian Jewish child psychoanalyst and educator who fled Nazi Europe for the United States in the 1930s. After working with children at a camp in Michigan in the 1940s, he described the immersive nature of sleep-away camp as a “powerful drug” that could offer several potential benefits, including character training and “supportive mental hygiene.”