Boarding school

Flexi-boarding at 13 doesn’t damage children! How ridiculous. At dd’s school the flexi boarding places are incredibly popular - with the kids. Dd doesn’t do it because I missed the deadline for the form and she’s pretty cross with me about it. Now she has to join the waiting list behind all the others who wanted to do it but didn’t get a place. I’m quite glad in a way because it’s expensive!

They love it because it’s like a sleepover a couple of nights a week. They get to do their homework together, chat over tea, and play table football or whatever in their common room. Each house also has a dog. They have a blast, and if they don’t fancy it for whatever reason, they go home instead.

Not at all the same thing as sending primary aged kids off to board full time.

@jeaux90 I’m sure your daughter will be very happy with your arrangement. Don’t take the criticism on here to heart.

Hmmm, what's that? Oh, sterilised milk and Stork margarine! 😅

I loved my parents and vice versa and I also loved boarding school. I started aged 11 though.. Very different from 8. It does suit some children.
Sometimes I smell a particular something, eg soap or flower. And think oh that's really nice then realise that it's because it reminds me of school.

You have a child. Change the industry you’re in. It’s always a choice.

Yes, I judge things that damage children.

If you think that’s bad I know someone who moved herself and her husband to Australia (they are a surgeon and an anaesthetist and both had very highly paid jobs offered to them in a hospital there) and took their younger child with them but left their school age child in a UK boarding school! Their argument was they didn’t want him to leave the UK education system as they didn’t feel the Australian was as good as an equivalent and they planned to come back eventually. So they only saw him in school holidays - and only the longer ones at that. The shorter ones he stayed with relatives in the UK.

Because in your opinion there is no reason ever to use boarding in any shape or form.

There are many reasons why people do board their kids and some of these reasons are because of being a lone parent.

HTH

Why are people making this about single mums?

The thread is about sending children away to boarding school. I don't have an opinion on single parents, just parents who choose to send their kids away from them, so they can do a job they choose instead.

@MintJulia I am right there with you.

What I've learnt from being a single mum is everyone has got a bloody opinion on our lives.

Private/flexi boarding has been brilliant for both me and DD13

My ds does this, every time I need to travel. It works really well. DS likes to spend evenings with his friends, I get a break and can maintain my career. Since being a single mum, the school boarding team have been a truly reliable backup and I wouldn't have managed without them.

If I get stuck behind a motorway pileup or whatever, I just ring the school, he goes to the boarding house for his tea, and I can collect whenever.

It's good for the regular boarders too because they get more variety of company. For working mums with teens, it is a Godsend 😊

I'm not putting my career before my child. I am balancing out the needs as a single parent to work and sometimes travel alongside my DD13's need for stability.

Her boarding two nights a week is stable, it's a lovely environment. She likes routine being ND and very clever. The fact she is ND is the reason she is in a private school where she is flourishing.

I often feel sorry for people who have a specific, strident view on things like this, I do consider their empathy levels and also the lessons they are teaching their kids.

People are different, maybe consider that.

The 'your' was generic, I just happened to cross posts.

But no, I don't believe it is shameful to point out that anyone choosing a job over their child, to the point they send them away is shameful.

They're an adult, it's what they've chosen and if they don't like my opinion on it, I don't care.

And berating a single patent for trying to provide for her children isn't shameful?

DH works away. We live 5hrs away. He is still a very involved parent. He was the only parent to volunteer for the rugby club committee for example.
Being physically present doesn't always mean involved...

We chose this living arrangement over boarding school incidentally and still get stick for not being a proper family!

Putting your career before your children to the point you choose to send them away, is unspeakably selfish.

Shameful.

@NeonEyes right ok so you had a partner that changed his career so he could stay home. That's nice.

I'm a single parent who doesn't have a choice it's part of every job in my industry to travel a bit as and when required.

My DD13 boards two nights a week and occasionally a whole week for that reason. She loves it and it works for the dynamics in our life but obviously it's still wrong according to your judgy pants.

It's fine, life would be dull without different opinions I guess.

@tsunami tsunami · Yesterday 04:31
I know there are plenty of apologists but there’s now also plenty of research that shows boarding young children messes them up psychologically for life, aka ‘Boarding School Syndrome’: see Nick Duffell, Joy Schaverien, Alex Renton & others. Kind of obvious, really: have kids, dump them. It’s a very English phenomenon (designed to produce tough leaders to run an Empire) and lots of non-Brits view it with puzzlement. My college (at university) was chock-full of public school boarder-orphans and though I’d still count a few among my pals in general my own experience is that they frequently display signs of arrested/dysfunctional development: are often socially confident (to the point of thick-skinned) but acutely competitive (to the point of neurosis) yet underneath it anxious, often dishonest or avoidant, unable to form healthy attachments and have no/weak boundaries - actually (sorry to any early boarders on here) I know no ‘normal’ ex-boarders. They’re a car-crash, bless ‘em. That said, usually they’d consider that a compliment'

absolutely agree! I'm surrounded by ex-boarders - my industry and home counties region mean there's a high% of them in my company, and I know some of them very well.
Their social confidence is astonishing. but often makes them really unlikeable - until you get to now them, but that can take years given how high their walls are.
Many defend their parents choices, until they have a few gins/whiskies in them then it all come out.

That sounds suspiciously like certain politicians! Thick skinned, over confident, avoidant

I went to boarding school age 9 - AMA!

I have a friend whose two sons went at 8. Came home every weekend for the first year and now every other weekend. They seem completely happy. I've known them both since birth and neither seems phased by it. They get very long holidays too. One parent is a farmer, the other in the military.

I have a ds, same age who did normal state primary, has been an independent day pupil since 11 and now wants to board at 14. His choice. I can't afford it but he spends a few nights per term in the boarding house. I think he's at that age, his mates are more important.

Every child, every family is different. I wouldn't have chosen that route because I'd have missed ds too much, but experiences differ.

*certainly not very

It’s awful and it messes people up. I know two people who were at a boarding school, one from age 12 plus other idk what age they started, but both had awful experiences and neither would ever send their own kids to one. I very didn’t have children just to send them away for the majority of the year.

I am the parent who went PT because DW travelled and had the 'big' job. Could we have afforded a nanny, wrap around care, or even boarding so that we both could have that big career?

Yes. But it wasn't even a consideration. Having your children at home, looking after them yourself, for the most part, doing the boring stuff like the playdates and the running to and activities, reading to them, helping with homework isn't ' helicopter' anything. It's just parenting.

And anyone saying that boarding school makes a child 'independent' needs to give there head a good wobble - children 7/8/9 even 11/12/13 aren't suppose to be 'independent'. They're supposed to be part of a family that guides them towards an independent adulthood... not chucks them out to learn how to mask their emotions, and get on with it, as a child.

I’m a single parent I know I have not progressed in my career as I could have if I were able to work longer hours/commit to studying further because I’m a single parent

I made the choice to have a child and I manage to work as well as do many

Sorry I wasn't having a go. What you've described sounds perfect in your circumstances.

I find the term ‘helicopter parenting’ really bizarre too. What does it mean, exactly?

I work full time in a demanding role, as does DH but the world has changed now. Most people in these senior roles are of the age where they have children and most (appreciate not all) have a degree of flexibility.

I’ll be the first to admit that the hours between 8pm and bedtime are very sacred to me but I enjoy this time because my children are safe upstairs in their beds. I sometimes wonder if my Mum felt any guilt thinking of me asleep in a dorm that she actually never saw. This is a big one for me - parents never came into the dorms. To think that my daughters could be sleeping somewhere I could not picture in my mind is so strange to me.

Perhaps I am a helicopter parent - I’m not wild about sleepovers and there are only 2 families I will allow my daughter to stay at. I shudder at the thought of boarding school for them. I could write a list as long as my arm of the downright criminal things that happened at my boarding school in the 90’s and the ‘tamer’ comments from teachers and staff such as “you’re developing into a woman, aren’t you?”.

People who’s kids live at home with them aren’t “Helicopter parents”