It wasn't that long ago that the concept of "being away" meant what it said. People left the faces and places of normal daily life for something completely different. Completely different, in fact, was the whole point.

Children went off to summer camp to make new friends, enjoy the outdoors, short-sheet their counselors' beds and sneak candy into their bunks. If they felt the need to communicate with the home front, they wrote a letter. If they grew homesick, the counselors did their best to help them through it. Phone calls to and from home were for emergencies only, because everyone understood that learning some independence and solving their own problems was an important part of the camping experience, and that each conversation with Mom or Dad made the adjustment more difficult.

Equally important was the lesson for parents in letting go.

Now, for good or ill, nobody has to let go, ever.

The generations that grew up being truly away at camp, and that love to wax nostalgic about it, nevertheless are insisting on staying connected to their children in ways their own parents never were -- and never wanted to be.

Of course this is mostly due to the technological revolution that has transformed human interaction and raised expectations for constant contact. Digital cameras, cell phones and wireless Internet devices traverse thousands of miles in seconds.

Take that ability to reach anybody anywhere at anytime, add an angst-ridden age of hyper-parenting, and you get motive, means and opportunity for relentless parental meddling. Sooner or later, summer camp starts looking like surveillance camp, and kids who go away find that they may as well have brought Mom and Dad with them.

It seemed harmless enough when camps began posting daily photos on password-protected Web sites. Parents could check to see whether their kids looked sufficiently happy and entertained. But not all the kids' photos showed up every day or caught them at their best moment, so parents started calling to ask why Jimmy wasn't at the softball game, or why Sarah looked kind of depressed.

That, in turn, gave rise to the next level of interference, as reported last week in The New York Times. It seems that high-end camps in the Northeast are hiring full-time parent liaisons who do nothing all day but deal with high-maintenance adults back home. So, while the girls at a camp in Eastern Pennsylvania were learning to swim, their parents were "bombarding the camp with calls: one wanted help arranging private guitar lessons for her daughter, another did not like the sound of her child's voice during a recent conversation, and a third needed to know -- preferably today -- which of her daughter's four varieties of vitamins had run out."

At this rate of escalation, it's only a matter of time until camps start developing the next generation of nanny-cams -- a network of miked, closed-circuit TV cameras that can be trained on specific children via homing devices implanted under their skin. Then parents wouldn't have to settle for the word of the camp liaison. They could just turn on their laptops and boot up a personalized version of "The Wire."

Maybe this is the price expensive camps pay for charging $10,000 for the summer, but one suspects the real cost is to the children who don't get an authentic experience of "being away." One shudders to think of them at college, with their parents commandeering everything from room assignments and class schedules to meal choices and final grades.

There's no use blaming technology for this lamentable trend. The real culprits are the humans who employ it to an obsessive degree. People who once sojourned to the beach or mountains to slow down, breathe deep and relax now take their work load with them. Instead of disengaging from their normal routine, they drag it along by laptop. The up side is flexibility to travel in spite of deadlines and demands. The down side is that checking e-mail every hour gets in the way of being away.

In the fall of 2002, my family sailed around the world for 100 days on Semester at Sea. It was the first time the program provided Internet connections on board. Access was limited and expensive, but the students lined up for hours, filling the considerable down time involved in crossing the Pacific. Every port arrival sent them tearing off to Internet cafes. The SAS staff tried to discourage them from trading reality for its virtual cousin, to little avail.

Now they don't even try. The program has fully embraced all manner of communication, from in-room phones that handle long-distance calls to wireless connections shipwide, said SAS President Les McCabe, adding that the current SAS ship has more broadband than any other passenger liner on the high seas.

"We used to feel that the ability to disconnect was a key part of the overall experience," Mr. McCabe said. "But we came to realize that this generation has a different expectation about being connected, not just to friends and family back home but also to information. Our students now have access to the entire library of the University of Virginia [the program's academic sponsor] and to online news publications so they can see what's happening in the countries they'll visit."

It's hard to argue with those benefits, which would have made my job as a journalism teacher a lot easier. But many of us are still learning how to manage the technology so that it doesn't manage us.

Moms and dads especially. Just because parents can reach their kids anywhere anytime doesn't mean they should. If adults don't get a handle on that, the joy of being gone will be gone.