My oldest went to sleepaway camp last week. It was five nights away, the longest he has ever been away from us.

I had been dreading this ever since we signed him up in January. What if he couldn’t fall asleep at night? What if the other kids were mean to him? What if he disliked the activities or his counselors disliked him?

He was so excited, and it turned out he had a great time. But the long week of fretting about him brought some memories to the surface, memories of the other times I have had to let him go and send him out into the world.

When he was about two years old, I signed him up for a drop-in daycare in the neighborhood. At the time I was overwhelmed by the demands of a toddler and a baby at home; someone had recommended the drop-in daycare for a respite, and I happily signed him up. But I cried on the first day I dropped him off.

“What if the other kids make fun of his Elmo lunchbox?” I anxiously texted my friend from the daycare parking lot. “Casey, he’s two,” she replied. “They all have Elmo lunchboxes right now.”

I coped only a little bit better when he went to full-time Kindergarten three years later (at least the Elmo lunchbox was long gone by then).

“It’s just, how can we send him out into the world?” I asked my husband when he very much wanted to be asleep. “The world doesn’t know how amazing he is on the inside. They don’t love him like we do. They have no idea.”

And it’s true: the world does not care about our children the way we care about them. We cannot change this. And I had always thought that my job as a parent was to provide that foundation of love and support so he always had an emotionally warm place to return to.

But I’m starting to think the key is actually to teach our kids to love themselves the way that we love them. To light the fire inside rather than forcing them into lifelong dependence for sympathy and warmth from their aging parents.

I am thinking very hard about how to gift to my son my love for him and all his imperfections, and how to wrap it up in a way that makes it easy to take it out into the world.