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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Op here. Thanks for other suggestions! I could honestly care less how it looks. My concern is purely that it will be so tangled we will have to cut it. If that's what happens, it happens, but I'd like to avoid it.

Her hair care takes me 15-20 minutes daily (on top of her work). Any less than that and it's more work the next day. It's not a reasonable request for a counselor.[/quote]

OP, I'm a former camp staffer and agree with the post at 9:19. It's fine to put it on the camp's radar especially if the camp is used to having kids her age there. Any experienced staffer has seen this issue before -- your daughter won't be the first kid they've had who had badly tangled hair.

You can be clear that you're not asking a counselor to spend 15 minutes a day on her hair -- you're right, that's not doable, and they might tell you they don't help kids with hair at all -- but you can just say you want to note that your DD's hair might end up tangled. If she tends to get upset if it's badly tangled, you might mention that too, but you also need to work with her on that before camp, so she really understands that no one is going to be there arranging her hair. (She'll probably be having too much fun to care as much when there, though!)

I would work with her now on a few things:

--Wearing hats. A sturdy baseball cap, the kind with a hole at the back, is good for pulling her hair through the hole and it stays up in a ponytail and off the back of her neck (because that hair is going to be HOT on her at camp). 
--Do you use a simple pump-spray, leave-in detangler? If not, I'd try some and teach her at least to use that and brush it into her hair. Some kinds do help hair be less tangled though it'll look greasier as well. 
--I like the French braids idea for the start of camp! But it won't last 10 days, so prep her on what happens next. I'd try it on her now, maybe over some weekends, so she's used to sleeping on the braids - that would be a deal-breaker for my own DD, since she says sleeping on a braid is too lumpy; be prepared to deal if your girl says she won't sleep on the braids.
--Does the camp have swimming daily? If so, she would need to wash out her hair even with the braids in it or her hair and scalp will be pretty fried by chlorine if it's a pool, or will frankly get smelly if it's a pond. Again, I'd test the braids before sending her to camp with them, to see if she can really keep them in for days at a time, since swimming and bathing as well as sleeping issues might mean they don't work.
--I have worked at a camp that had lots of ticks. If the camp she's going to is a very woodsy camp, you need to ensure that she has hats and/or bandanas to wear over all that hair as much as possible and that she gets practice wearing them. I've found that some kids just hate to have any hat or bandana on their heads so it can take some getting used to.

She might come home and add her vote to yours for cutting her hair off. Her hair sounds like my DD's hair and cutting is much better than 20 minutes a day of hair prep on a child of seven![/quote]

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