attention.

every single camper wants attention from at least one staffer.
i've only ever known one camper who i would honestly say did not.
some come to camp FOR the staff(i was that kid). but even the ones who come for the activities, to make friends, or because their parents make them, still care about the staff even if it's not what they love most about camp. everybody wants you to like them.
there are the ones that(literally) hang all over their cabin leader, clearly campaigning for favorite-of-the-week. but there are others who more quietly admire you.
both types equally deserve you-time, but if you aren't careful, the first type can end up being the only ones to get it. when you have two or three that are always begging to hold your hand or sit by you, or if you have a couple of difficult ones that take up a lot of time, it can be easy to forget the quiet ones.
all of them need to get some kind of special attention from you during their time at camp. maybe you ask them to sit by you at a meal or at canteen, maybe you give them a special job during cleanup, or braid their hair at bedtime. but somehow, they need to go home remembering that you cared about them. if every one goes home thinking "i bet i was their favorite camper", you've had a great week.
story time.
this year, we had lots and lots of twins in my unit. as in, almost every week we had one set or more. the first week we had two sets of twins and one set of triplets.
those triplets are some of the most adorable girls you will ever meet. all their names started with E, but i'll call them A, B, and C.
A and B were in my cabin. A was the kind that makes it obvious that she thinks her cabin leader is the best thing since caramel filled churros. i loved her. but she was a subcategory of this type which i call an "aggressive campaigner," meaning, if i turned my attention from her for more than five minutes, she would start acting up. not really in a bad way, but she would get louder than everyone else, usually interrupt whichever girl i was listening to, something else mildly disruptive like that. now she was great and she knew i loved her(and she would ask all the time if she was my favorite[to which you must always answer "i love ALL my girls too much to have favorites!" and this usually makes them just as happy as if you answered yes]), but when i would explain to her that i loved everybody else and wanted to spend time with all of them, she would get upset and go cling to someone else(she actually told me on the last day "tell the people in charge that i want to be in *certain other's* cabin next year!" which made me kinda sad).
C was fun too, and special since i didn't see her as much as the other two, her being in another cabin and all. but B won the best-that-week award*.
she was the quiet admiration type. she watched everything i did, and anytime i was talking she would be visibly listening(like you can just look at her and you know she's hanging on every word), even if i was just talking about what might be for lunch. she wasn't so much shy as she was willing to let other people talk first.(just like i always was with my staffers! i don't think most of them realized how much i liked them, because i didn't take enough chances to talk to them. i love getting campers like that, it makes me feel like i wasn't the weird one in the group)
thankfully, i had an awesome staffer working with me(probably the best i've ever had), so when she was around, A would jump on her(so would everyone else actually, they didn't get to see her much). the second night, i took advantage of this and used that time to hang out with B. and when people weren't fighting over me, she really had a lot to say, plus she's super funny.
i've had lots of girls like B, before and after her. but it was only this year, when i had her, that i saw how important it is to make a real effort to give each of them a little bit of my time just for them.
i can't think any witty sentence to close this with, so here's a random picture from 2008 staff orientation.

can't remember who drew it...but i took the picture.

*by which i mean i remembered her more happily than i did any others from that week. i don't keep a list, tell the "winner", or treat them any differently than the rest.