Lifelong impact of going to Boarding school

[Munichfam5]

Just read a very upsetting article in the Observer featuring former boarding school pupils and their experiences - it’s from a documentary called ‘boarding on insanity’
at boardingoninsanity.com

Anyone else seen it ?

I haven’t. The only two people who I have known really well who boarded were FIL and BIL. BIL had anxiety and FIL was very pompous, it covered insecurity.

I did have a female student who as an ex boarder and struggled without the routine and found having to self manage her study time difficult. She wanted a schedule. DH cousins boarded but they are very resilient women, sporty and always confident as adults and were very much like that as kids as well. I know them but not as well as BIL and FIL.

I am sure some must love it but not something I would have considered.

DH was sent to boarding school in the 1970s and was thoroughly miserable. He was adamant that our children would go to the local comprehensive.

He's never really forgiven his parents for sending him.

Boarding in the way it was offered many years ago is well known to have caused some very serious problems.

Yes I've seen this article. It was quite upsetting, I don't know of anyone my age or my children's age who have boarded so I would hope its a lot better now.
DH dad and auntie boarded in the 60's his dad hated it so much he ran away, his auntie hasn't really talked about it much. Didn't give me a very good impression though.

I've not read the article but my partner went to boarding school (a supposedly 'good' one) and the damage done to him is profound. Not only the abuse and bullying but the feeling of abandonment. At the time he was under pressure to tell his parents how much he was enjoying it, so he did. Interestingly he went to a reunion recently and they all felt the same; hating it but not telling their parents. They are mainly conventionally successful but the damage and learning to lie so early is so so damaging.

My DH needed years of therapy to get over his experience of boarding school. It wasn't that the school was bad, it was the feeling of complete abandonment by his parent's, and that was despite the fact that he went home most weekends. He felt quite happy at the time, it was years later in young adulthood that it hit him, and then intensified when we had our own children. It gave him so many opportunities but it seriously damaged his relationship with his parents.

All (except 1) of DH family were sent to boarding school at age 7. He has 2 aunts and 2 uncles all of whom are fucked up in their own way. His mum is odd in her relationship with him and her daughter to say the least. All very self absorbed.

I would certainly want to see boarding for under 11's banned unless they are in 'special' schools

I cant see why anyone would want to send their kids away

I went to boarding school and was very happy there. Also have a good relationship with parents and siblings (who also went- to different schools).
granted I did go to two different ones as the first was miserable but the second was fab, I suppose I was lucky in that my fellow boarders were mostly lovely as were the nuns who ran the school. We were well cared for.
this was in the 70’s and 80’s.
My experience was positive and I have no hang ups about it.

same here but in the 1980s. It really does have long term effects.

I've worked with many people who went to boarding school and nearly all of them came across as pretty emotionless and just 'odd'.

None of them appeared to have a good word to say about boarding either.

It was alright, I was a bit neutral about it. Loved uni though. Set loose into the big bad world with alacrity!! I loved wandering around without getting locked in at night.

Some people do have bad experiences at boarding school though.

I was a Day Pupil at a Boarding school in the 80's and 90's and even the friends I have who escaped relatively unscathed would probably have been very different people had they not been sent away by their parents. The women seem to have fared better than the men. I also know people from both the generation before and after me who were adversely affected by being sent to Boarding school. I am very very anti Boarding, its is more about the wants of The Parents than anything else except in a very tiny number of cases
Bear Grylls has a lot to say on the subject

I was sent to boarding school aged 9. My parents were abroad and |I could go 2 years without seeing them. I stayed with grandparents during holidays. They had various properties which they rented out so each time it was a holiday I usually came home to a different house and so had no friends locally.
My husband says I am cold. I am not, but find it very hard to express emotion. So much was kept bottled up in childhood that my emotions seem frozen. It was also hard to re-connect with my parents when they eventually came back to the UK.
This was in the 50's and 60's and from what I have seen boarding schools are very different now. Three of my grandchildren attend by their own choice and seem very happy there.

My boss was sent to Winchester from 11yrs old. He looks very bleak when it comes up in conversation so I do wonder what happened to him there. He’s quite good at blustering, can be extremely pompous despite being quite young and can be very caring one minute, then completely cold the next. He’s a very anxious and quite controlling person too. He doesn’t trust anyone easily, including himself.

I’m sure things have changed enormously now but DH went in the 1990s. He was a Forces kid and only boarded for two years but I can still see how much impact it had on him - the sense of abandonment by his parents as they moved abroad with his younger sibling. I don’t blame them, it must have seemed a good idea for him to board at a grammar secondary rather than move to a non-English speaking country, but he was 11 and I’m sure he never saw it that way.

I suspect for many people it’s the reason why they felt they were sent to boarding school more than the boarding itself.

Just to add some balance here.
DD 13 (Yr 8) is a day pupil at a boarding school (not a pressurised Southern one). Some of her friends are full time boarders and are happy + well adjusted. She would love to board but we can't afford it. She's done a few nights here and there and adores it.
The friends who board have only done so since Yr 7 and the school has amazing pastoral system. We've had most of her friends over to stay at various points and they are all really happy, chatty girls.

Boarding nowadays is very different to how it was even in the 90s.

I'm quoting this one but I could have picked any of the comments! There has been a lot of publicity on this issue via Charles Spencer and his recent book on boarding, and the sexual abuse inflicted upon him, also via the BBC presenter Nicky Campbell, I think his was Fettes College, and some kind of sexual abuse inflicted upon him and others... they have been trying to extradite the accused who is now living in South Africa.

There is a kind of omertà - a code of silence - on this issue.

It is interesting given the number of ex-public school types who go on to attain power in Westminster, Boris Johnson most famously. If they haven't been abused themselves, or been the abuser, they must have learned how to turn a blind eye to those unlucky enough to have had it done to them, a classic thing of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. You get this in State organisations a lot, say, in the Church or the Police, or local Councils, why, it's on an AIBU thread about the state of the NHS currently active.

I went to a nominally public school but not like that, I found when I went to Bristol Uni there were a lot of these types who took to uni like a duck to water, in particular the being away from home aspect, because they'd already had that baptism of fire at the age of 8 or 10, whereas other normal kids will have found themselves away from their family, their home, their home town etc for the very first time at the age of 18, and even if you've been looking forward to it, it can knock you back a bit.

When parents say their kids are boarding because they made that choice themselves or insisted upon it, it always makes me wonder what sort of home life they had for them to consider living in an institution preferable to living at home with their family.

My daughter would love to board and we have a great relationship + home life but for a 13/,14 Yr old what could be better fun than living with your best friends?

I boarded from 11-18 in the 90’s. I had a happy home and family. It was absolutely fantastic, some very happy memories and I’m very well adjusted and loving and all those things you say should be gone. All my friends were similar, and are very happy healthy adults.

I think boarding school was a dumping ground for children from very unhappy families sometimes though and it’s those kids you are now saying are like they are because of boarding school. I bet lots are ruined by the family they came from, not the experience of boarding school.

Same - I loved boarding school and was very happy. I have friends with children at the same school who are thriving. That said, it certainly doesn't suit all children.

I think your dd has a romanticised view of what boarding is really like in the long-term. Her friends may well seem happy and chatty, my DH certainly describes being that way, it was only in young adulthood that he started to feel the impact.

My friend who grew up in a council flat, won a scholarship to one of the top boarding schools exclusively for deaf children. She absolutely loved it and if she had her time again, wouldn't change anything.

I've worked in 3 boarding schools and 3/4 of the students at all 3 were there by choice. That obviously does leave 1/4 of students who just wanted to go home, but were there at parental insistence. These students were almost exclusively Asian. I felt very sorry for them.

During covid, some students chose to go home and not return to boarding immediately. Post covid though, the students made the choice to go back to boarding schools, albeit much bigger schools were there were far more boarders and a much wider boarding programme.

Ultimately, I'd say successful boarding is very much about the boarding staff. Having good staff who take being in loco parentis very seriously makes a lot of difference.