Keeping Tabs on Campers

By Jeninne Lee-St. John

Used to be, you packed your kids off to summer camp, mailed them a care package and waited to get a couple of obligatory letters in reply. While camps still try to get kids back to basics, by banning iPods and e-mail, parents are using technology to stay in close touch--maybe too close.

More than 200 camps this summer are using Bunk Replies, a new service by Bunk1.com that zaps faxes of kids' handwritten letters into their parents' e-mail In boxes. Angela Williams, of San Angelo, Texas, says she relishes the "instant gratification" of getting e-letters from her son Harvey, 13. Hundreds of camps also post video, newsletters and as many as 500 photos online each day for Mom and Dad to peruse--or buy. The technology, pioneered by a Connecticut-based company called eCamp, is so popular that many camps have had to hire staff solely to take and upload pictures.

Though these electronic umbilical cords are meant to comfort anxious parents, they can backfire. "Now we get phone calls that are like, 'I saw my kid on your website, but he wasn't smiling. Is everything O.K.?'" says Richard Moss, who has run Camp Lenox in Massachusetts for 20 years. That may explain the recent surge in full-family camps, where kids and parents go hiking and sit around the campfire together. The number of these programs registered with the American Camp Association has jumped, from 192 in 1991 to 552 today. Pass the s'mores, Mom.