Staff Training and the Importance of Emotional Safety
Our son will be attending his first away-from-Kupugani sleepaway camp this summer. As intentional parents, we are now on the other side of the camp director-parent dynamic. Since our boy’s bedwetting—continual since he was a toddler (like his parents’ before him)—has seemed to increase of late, defeating even the best efforts of his pull-up style bedtime diapers—I gave the camp director a quick call. I wanted to just double check that the camp’s dealing with that issue would continue the process we have had at home of making sure that he felt no shame about it.
At Camp Kupugani, we are almost halfway through our two-week training of our activity staff, with counselor staff training to follow for a week after that. We are excited to have returning staff members, overjoyed to be reunited and ecstatic to be back at camp. It is exciting to have returning staff who are trained in camp activities and procedures. They look forward to staff training to be able to help transition the new staff. Returning staff members’ comfort helps put the new staff members at ease, even as some of them adjust to being in a new country, especially as several new staff members are from all over the world.
My own call to my son’s away-from-Kupugani camp director underscored for me the vital importance for staff members to fully realize that they provide primary care for campers, whose parents are not there. Ultimately, the emotional and physical safety of the campers is the main concern of our staff. Less than a full week into training, they have realized and embraced that staff training is the first step to maximizing safety of the campers. Like our staff members, I am excited to have started training because we recognize that we are the ones who care when our campers’ parents or guardians aren’t there. During training, we learn and practice techniques and systems to keep the children healthy and empowered.