kids independence

Read today about a celeb who was afraid to let her 16 yr old daughter go off on a plane to visit a friend for two weeks. Something aboutworrying over her and not being able to have her be gone for that long. I am SO not that kind of mother. I CHOSE to send my six year old to an out and about day camp where I willingly put him in the care of other teenagers (the counselors for the most part are pretty young), put him on a bus and send him out into the world to do fun things. My rationale is partly that this summer is already so crazy with the birth and the newborns and the exhaustion of the parents and the integration of the grand-parent carpool train that he might as well have FUN. And the places he is going are things I could never do on my own with him to such a degree and he is having a blast. I could have chosen to send him to arts and craft camp all day or gymnastics or something indoors at the center (like his little sister), but in this case, I feel like I am giving him the opportunity to be an adventurer (in a somewhat controlled environment) and explore what it is to do these things that he would not otherwise have the opportunity to do (movies, ball parks, fun kid places that I've never even heard of before). I actually did choose to send him to gymnastics camp for the middle part of the summer, but he got carried away in the spirit of the specialties camp where he spent the first part of the summer and instead, he chose to stay there with one of his friends and do a bunch of different activities that he got to choose on his own (lots of sports instead of art or music which I would have picked).
This independence is something that I am actually trying to cultivate in him, and reminds me of some of the choices that I have made for myself...(Israel, train station TA to Jerusalem, leaving Kenes) My choices may not have been the best ones at the time, or may have had been hard, but they were ALL mine and they all had actions and reactions that came from making those choices. It's taken me an adulthood to be this innocently independent. Yoni can do it with innocence in his youth with only his own results.