First, begin with a study of this photo. I’m glad that guy in the middle isn’t my dad (or my husband for that matter). Hey, Mr. Stern and Grumpy! And then move to the left for Carmella Soprano (yes, I know she’s a fictional character) and her slightly heavier sidekick with a white visor (the better to see her child at visiting day from afar?).  And then there’s crazy Ms. Two Hands in the Air, who apparently has gone a full 24 hours without seeing her child.

Apparently residential camp has changed as Baby Boomer parents have become more helicopter-like. At least that’s what these anecdotes suggest.

Exhibit A:

Mr. Picon, who owns several auto dealerships, remembered calling Mr. Kagan, the Bryn Mawr director, on Jaime’s very first day of camp back in 2001.

“I called the camp at 7 a.m. and Dan answered the phone,” Mr. Picon said. “He said, ‘Jaime’s fine. And are you going to call me every morning?’ “

Anticipating a lecture, Mr. Picon said, “I think I am.”

To which Mr. Kagan, himself the father of three daughters, warmly replied: “Well, do it at this time of day, it’s when I have some free time.”

If you don’t think your kid is going to be okay at a residential camp, don’t send him. Period. The camp director can’t say that because he needs your money.

Exhibit B:

Norman E. Friedman, a consultant who conducts training at 44 camps, said parents also take up valuable camp resources by breaking the rules they have tacitly agreed to.

“They’ll give their child two cellphones, so if they get caught with the first one, ‘Just give it up and you’ll have the second one to talk to me,’ “ he said. “That’s widespread, not isolated. I call it fading parental morality. What they’re doing is entering into delinquent behaviors with their children. And what kind of statement is that to a child?”

Well, it’s a statement that says, essentially, The Rules Don’t Apply To Us Because We’re Special. Nice.

Exhibit C:

Starting about seven years ago, camps tried to satiate parents’ need to know by uploading pictures of kids at play daily to password-protected Web sites, a one-way communication tool that seemed to respect the sleep-away tradition of maintaining distance. But such real-time glimpses often aggravate the problem, as the obsessed become obsessed with what they are seeing — or not seeing.

“I have parents calling and saying they saw their child in the background of a picture of other children and he didn’t look happy, or his face looked red, has he been putting on enough suntan lotion, or I haven’t seen my child and I have seen a lot of other children, is my child so depressed he doesn’t want to be in a picture,” said Jay Jacobs, who has run Timber Lake Camp in Shandaken, N.Y., since 1980.

I really shouldn’t read the New York Times.