It is the third week of camp. You drop your seven-year-old off Monday morning and the counselor smiles in that way camp counselors smile, like a person who took the job because they love kids and now realizes the job is much, much harder than they thought.
You signed the medical form. You checked the box that said “ADHD.” You wrote “needs movement breaks” in the small line under “Anything else we should know?” You drove home and worried.
By Wednesday afternoon, your phone rings. It is the camp director. She is using her this-is-not-an-emergency-but-it-is-an-emergency voice. Your kid had a meltdown at the lunch table. Refused to come back to the group. Threw a flip-flop. The counselor did not know what to do.
You knew this would happen. You did not know how to prevent it. The medical form gave you a quarter-inch of space. The “anything else” line is too small to explain anything else.
This post is the thing I wish someone had handed me before our first camp summer. It is a two-page letter you write yourself, send two weeks before drop-off, and put in your kid’s backpack so the counselor on day one already knows everything they need to know.
Why “needs movement breaks” is not enough
Camp counselors are usually 16 to 22 years old. They are smart, well-meaning, and trained for a weekend. The training covered first aid, kitchen safety, lifeguard rotations, and how to handle homesickness. It did not cover ADHD. It did not cover sensory processing. It did not cover what it actually looks like when an executive function tank empties out at 11:14 a.m. on day three of a five-day camp.
The counselor reads “needs movement breaks.” She thinks: OK, when he gets fidgety, I’ll let him stretch. What she does not know:
- Your kid does not get fidgety. He goes still and quiet, then explodes 40 minutes later.
- “Stretching” is not a movement break. A movement break is 10 minutes of cardio that raises dopamine. Stretching is a Pinterest pose.
- The trigger for the explosion was not the moment of the explosion. It was three transitions ago, at the swim/snack switchover, when no one warned him the schedule was changing.
None of this is the counselor’s fault. She does not have the information.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2019 clinical practice guideline on ADHD treatment specifically calls out the need for collaboration between caregivers and the adults supervising kids in non-school settings. It notes that consistent communication about behavioral patterns and accommodations is one of the strongest predictors of success in summer programs (AAP, 2019).
Translation: the counselor needs more than the medical form. She needs you.
What the camp letter actually does
A good camp letter does four things in two pages or fewer:
- Names the diagnosis (only if your family chooses to share) and the meds, in plain language
- Translates the behaviors the counselor will see into what is actually happening in your kid’s brain and body
- Hands the counselor specific phrases that work and specific phrases that make things worse
- Tells the counselor when to call you and when not to
That is it. Not a clinical summary. Not the IEP. Not a parenting manifesto. A counselor-friendly hand-off.
The structure that works
Here is the structure I have been using and refining since 2024. It fits on two pages, takes about 25 minutes to fill out, and is written in the language of someone who watches kids for a living, not someone who reads developmental psychology papers for a living.
Section 1: The basics (4 lines)
Name. Age. Diagnoses (if you choose to share). Current medication and timing. Pediatrician phone if it is relevant.
If you are not comfortable sharing the diagnosis, write “neurodivergent” or “needs accommodations for executive function and sensory regulation.” A good camp will accept this. If a camp pushes back on that wording, it is telling you something about the camp.
Section 2: What you will see, and what is actually happening
This is the most important section. It is a translation table. Two columns: What it looks like on the left, What is actually happening on the right. Three to five rows.
Example:
- Looks like: Refusing to leave the lunch table when the next activity starts. Actually: Transition warning was missed. Needs a 90-second heads-up before any switch.
- Looks like: Going quiet and not answering questions. Actually: Overstimulated. Needs to leave the loud space before he can talk again.
- Looks like: Saying “I hate this” when he was just laughing. Actually: Hit the regulation wall. The “I hate this” is the warning shot.
This is where the counselor has the lightbulb moment. She stops seeing “behavior” and starts seeing the underlying pattern.
This idea is not new. Mona Delahooke writes about it in Brain-Body Parenting (2022) as the difference between top-down and bottom-up behavior. Top-down behavior is “I am choosing this.” Bottom-up behavior is “my nervous system is making this happen and I cannot stop it.” Camp counselors usually default to interpreting everything as top-down, because that is what their training and life experience has shown them. Your translation table reframes it.
Section 3: What helps
Three to five things that reliably regulate your kid. These are specific, concrete, and short. Not “calming techniques” but the actual phrases or actions.
Examples:
- Saying “I see you, take a minute.” Not “calm down.” Never “calm down.”
- Letting him go to the bathroom even if he just went. He uses it as a reset space.
- A 90-second timer for transitions. The number 90 matters; “in a minute” does not.
- Crunchy snack. Pretzels, apple, ice. Crunching is a regulation tool, not a request for food.
Russell Barkley calls these “point-of-performance interventions”: small things, delivered exactly when needed, that work because they happen at the right moment. Big interventions delivered at the wrong moment do not work (Barkley, Taking Charge of ADHD, 4th ed., 2020).
Section 4: What hurts
Three to five things that reliably escalate things, written without judgment. The counselor is not the villain here. She is just a person who needs the information.
Examples:
- Counting down (“3, 2, 1”) in front of the group. Public pressure shuts him down.
- Asking “why did you do that?” right after a meltdown. He cannot answer; the question makes it worse.
- “You’re being rude” or “you’re disrespecting me.” Words about character escalate. Words about the situation work.
- Surprise schedule changes without a warning, even small ones (kickball before swim instead of after).
Section 5: When to call me, when not to
Be specific. Counselors will either over-call (every 15 minutes for a sniffle) or under-call (waiting until the third meltdown). You set the threshold.
Example:
- Call me if: a meltdown lasts more than 20 minutes. He has hurt himself or another kid. He says “I want to go home” three or more times. He refuses to eat or drink for more than 4 hours.
- Do not call me if: he cried at drop-off. He needed an extra 10-minute break. He said “I hate this” once. He did not eat the snack. He had a hard transition and recovered.
How to send it
Two weeks before camp, email it to the camp director. Ask her to forward it to whoever will be your kid’s primary counselor. Bring a printed copy on day one and put it in your kid’s backpack with a sticky note: “If today goes sideways, this is the cheat sheet.” The counselor will read it the moment she needs it. Promise.
If you have not done this before and you are wondering whether it is “too much” — it is not. Camp directors I have talked to (and I have talked to many) all say the same thing: we wish more parents did this. Specifics make the counselor’s job easier, not harder.
This is part of a bigger pattern
The camp letter is one of those small artifacts that does outsize work. So is the morning visual schedule. So is the after-school 3:45 PM reset. So is the three-sentence repair after a hard moment. None of these things are dramatic. All of them are scaffolding.
By late April, when most camps are doing their intake calls, the kid you are looking at is the one in end-of-school-year burnout. The reserves are thin. He is not at his strongest. Sending him into camp without a hand-off letter is sending him in alone.
Sending him in with the letter is not solving ADHD. It is solving the information gap.
If you want a head start
I just released a Summer Camp Prep Packet on the CalmHomeParenting Etsy shop. It is the editable version of the letter, plus the accommodations request form, the day-1 backpack survival packet, the drop-off conversation script, and the post-camp decompression guide. Sixteen pages. Editable PDF. The whole thing takes about 25 minutes to fill out and you send it once.
You do not need the packet to write the letter. The structure above is the whole framework. If you have 25 minutes and a Word document, you have everything you need. The packet exists because some weeks I do not have 25 minutes and a clean head, and a fillable form is the difference between a counselor who knows my kid and a counselor who does not.
Either way, send the letter. The counselor on day one is going to do her best. Help her be ready.
Sources cited: American Academy of Pediatrics, “Clinical Practice Guideline for the Diagnosis, Evaluation, and Treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Children and Adolescents” (Pediatrics, 2019). Russell Barkley, Taking Charge of ADHD, 4th edition (2020). Mona Delahooke, Brain-Body Parenting (2022). Information for parents of ADHD and neurodivergent children; not medical advice. For your kid’s specific situation, consult your pediatrician.