IT can come as a bit of a shock every now and again, when you realise you and your other half might not be singing from the same hymn book about parenting.

“Seriously, boys have to be allowed to be boys,’’ he argued. “You can’t baby him forever and that means letting him venture out of the nest and away from mum every now and then.”

Yep, my husband was all-too-relaxed about letting our son head off for three days to band camp, hundreds of kilometres away without me. “Anyway, you know how much he really, really wants to go,” was the clinching argument.

I wasn’t at all sure about this. Our boy is only nine and he’d never been away from home before. And it seems like only yesterday that he was sleeping in his baby cot at the end of our bed. I was positive he just was not ready. Certainly, I wasn’t ready for the words: “Mum I’m going on a school camp.”

The school camps I remember as I child in SA were pretty grim. They always took place in the middle of winter, when it seemed to rain eternally. We went for hikes up muddy hillsides, but were mostly cooped up inside draughty old halls or Nissen huts, playing card games or charades, watching old movies on a dodgy movie projector and crying ourselves to sleep at night from homesickness.

It’s not that I didn’t trust my boy’s wonderful teachers to look after him or know that he would behave himself and do the right thing. The program – three days of music and band practice – looked great. And the camp site near the Hawkesbury River, carefully inspected via the internet and Google Earth, looked terrific.

I knew I had to give in gracefully and support the whole thing. Still it wasn’t easy watching that bus drive off at the crack of dawn on a cold, foggy Canberra morning. I have never been so glad as to hear the phone ring when he rang me to report he had arrived safe and sound.

Later that night, when he rang again and tearfully told me how homesick he was and how much he missed me, I did want to jump into the car and drive up to the Hawkesbury to pick him up straight away. Then, next morning, he rang again, to say he was having a great time and that we didn’t need to worry.

I do know how important it was to go through this, to tell him that he would be okay, that we – his parents – love and trust him and know he is able to do things on his own.

But thinking about growing up – there’s no doubt, it can be tough on mums.