Whether at sleepaway camp for the first time – or maybe the sixth – kids, counselors, even staffers may need a mom once in a while.
Michelle Cades fills that role at Capital Camps in Waynesboro, Pa., where many kids from the Washington area spend their summers. Her title is yoetzet, the Hebrew term for advisor, and she takes her role as informal in loco parentis seriously.
As one of four yoetzot, Cades, 52, finds she’s on the run from wake-up to lights out and beyond. This summer, Capital Camps’ 400 or so first session campers sought out Cades for problems big and small. Homesickness can be an issue, particularly for first timers, and Cades stepped in to make those campers feel more comfortable about missing home and their parents.
“A typical day completely runs the gamut,” she said over Zoom after lights out one evening in July. “I get into everything from homesickness to peer conflict and conflict resolution. It’s 24/7.
“The most basic things I deal with are forgotten items from home,” she said. “Parents will either call and say, ‘My kid forgot this,’ or the kid will realize they forgot something. I’ll be in touch with the parents. My role here also is to be a parent liaison. So I return phone calls to any parents from my [camp] village.”
That might be a worried parent who didn’t see their camper in that day’s camp activity photo posts. Or a parent who received a postcard from a camper who had a bad day. Cades will seek out that camper to check in; invariably that bad day has long been forgotten.
Cades, herself a mom of three, earned master’s degrees in both social work and special education, and during the school year she has served as a clinical social worker/special needs coordinator at Congregation Beth Emeth in Herndon, where she and her family belong. She also volunteered with Fairfax County Public Schools Special Education PTA. All of this professional training, along with her own well-honed mom instincts, go into her work as a camp yoetzet.
But not every camp problem can be solved with a check-in or a phone call. These days, some campers arrive with serious or numerous issues. It’s not that in the past family and mental health issues didn’t impact campers and counselors but, Cades pointed out, “There’s a lot more awareness about mental health and mental health needs now. We definitely see more kids coming in with various mental health diagnoses than there were back when I was a camper. It is very commonplace that we’ll have campers with anxiety, ADHD, autism, learning disabilities, social anxiety and so forth, which in the past weren’t necessarily diagnosed.”
She said that while Capital Camps is inclusive, it is not a therapeutic camp.
“We all do behavior interventions … and we’ll sit down and process with kids when something is going on,” she said. “But one-on-one therapy is not part of the yoetzet’s role.
An unexpected issue that arises, Cades said, involves reporting to authorities: “Every single summer we end up making reports to child protective services for concerns about abuse or neglect.”
These complex family and child dynamics involve navigating multiple jurisdictions across multiple states, because the camp population spans Virginia to New Jersey, along with a small cohort from Israel.
What keeps Cades coming back to camp each summer, she said, is the way Jewish values are infused into the camp ethos and daily activities.
“There’s something really wonderful about seeing everybody come together for Shabbat and Havdalah,” she said, “because a lot of kids don’t celebrate when they’re not at camp.”
But more than that, “we talk a lot at camp about Jewish values and of the different opportunities that we have and teaching teachable moments where we tie in Jewish values.”
If kids are gossiping, Cades might tell them about the Jewish concept of lashon harah, or evil speech.
There’s more, she said: Caring for other people you know, caring for the community, being kind to one another, helping each other out.
“Inclusion, too, is a huge value that we have here,” she said. “Jewish values are built into everything we do.” ■
Lisa Traiger is Washington Jewish Week’s arts correspondent.