To ask what boarding school is like

[Thesweetlife]

I went to a ‘normal’ state school and so did all my friends, both when I was a child and now. My life in my childhood/early teen years consisted of going to school, going home, eating tea with my family, watching TV, saw my friends on the weekends etc. It was quite a mundane life but I was very happy in my school days. I guess I wonder what it’s like to go to boarding school. How was your (or your DC’s) life different to that of the normal child/teen? Where you happy at your time at boarding school? Have you been shaped by it in the long run? How did it influence you in the long run? What sort of things went on that someone who went to a day school would be surprised by?

Did you deliberately only quote half of my sentence? The second half of my sentence made precisely this point ("I realise that some people couldn't cope with 2-3 weeks at a time, or that their children couldn't"). I'm not sure why you're trying to manipulate what I said, but I'm really sorry if your own observations of boarding schools have been negative.

So you can have your kid have an excellent private education, have tons of holidays and not be institutionalised? Interesting.

it’s almost as if most children don’t have to be sent to live with strangers.

i’m not sure why posh people are so keen on an educational type that actually has a syndrome named after it.

It sure why you assume people who go to boarding school are ‘posh’. My mum was a nurse and my dad worked as an engineer, they just prioritised schooling.

‘It sure why you assume people who go to boarding school are ‘posh’. My mum was a nurse and my dad worked as an engineer, they just prioritised schooling.’

er,
because they are as the fees for boarding are generally well out of the reach of those without a high income and/or family money.
I would politely suggest that’s the exception, not the norm.
or are you suggesting that WC parents aren’t sending their kids to boarding school because they don’t ‘just’ prioritise education??

@Snoopystick That could mean they had a household income of 100k or more.

I’m just trying to say that people who go to boarding school are not all what are traditionally called ‘posh’. There were many army / RAF kids at mine so not upper class.

You don't have to be posh to send your children to boarding school. Boarding school isn't exclusive to posh people. Military families, gifted children, sports scholarships, so many others.

At my school I mixed with everyone from royalty to celebrity child to military children to normal working class families and every other family set up you can think of

Colleague told
menthe thing he finds most difficult about his own children ( 6 & 10) is how needy and ‘soft’ they are. One has night terrors and he thinks the 10 yr old boy needs to toughen up and get on with it. Just be left to it to cry it out or deal with his irrational’ fears til the morning.he’s really pissed off even though it’s his wife who mainly get ups to deal with it.

colleague was sent or boarding school at 9.

His wife is refusing to consider the same boarding school. Or any boarding school. Can’t think why.

I begged my parents to send me to boarding school and I'm sure I would have been happier there (unless I ended up getting bullied of course).

I had an unhappy home and didn't like my school.

I'm also autistic and do much better with imposed structure.

I love to do extra curriculars and didn't have the the opportunity at home due to rural living, parents who didn't give a s* etc.

I’m working class. My DCs do not go to a boarding or private school. That said I try to ‘prioritise’ their schooling within my financial means eg paying for after school activities. My parents prioritised my schooling within their means and because of this we never went on holiday or had a nice car etc etc. I’m not sure how you’ve jumped to my meaning working class people don’t ‘just’ prioritise education.

Hell on earth

'It sure why you assume people who go to boarding school are ‘posh'

because they are for the most part. Or wealthy at least. Because it takes quite a bit of money to farm your kids out like that, and many people have ore than one kid... so £20k-£40k a year for a boarder becomes 2x, 3 x that.
These schools are a business and they don't maintain stables, private farms and zoos, cricket fields, swimming pools and all those buildings by having fees so low than anyone 'prioritising' education can afford it.

And as for the military kids, they're still the children of officers and in my experience still pretty posh by most people's standards...

I work with a lot of boarding schools, before anyone comes on to tell me that their postie dad and dinner lady mum have scrapped together enough for Roedean or Charterhouse or Bedes... that's the exception not the rule...

I am already on this thread but re-reading.

@handyweatherstation - this is so so true “the sense of abandonment and not knowing where 'home' is, getting along with anyone but belonging nowhere, the hypervigilance and reluctance to join groups”.

I was desperately desperately seeking community (have name changed now but spend a LOT of time here when my DC were younger).
It’s nice to see some old names I recognise now.

I boarded mid 80s to mid 90s for 9 years
Went away at age 8 nearly 9

Each time my DC have reached that age (youngest is now older than that) I am shocked that someone so small could be sent away in the name of “stability”

When my DS1 was in Y7 I realised by the October half term I had given him more help with homework in that one half term than my parents had given me in my whole senior school

I look back at my UCAS form which was so ill-advised with no one helping properly to write the statement - just “get it done”
The parents assumed the school were taking care of it all
My parents also never paid for my careers assessment because my
older brother had done one at some vast expense and they didn’t like what it said (to do practical stuff - my brother 100% should have been a building contractor or similar - he is super handy and great with people - would have made a fortune but it’s not “professional”).

Can’t agree with @greensleeves more - “Most of us spent the weekends
around in a daze watching tv and eating supernoodles. There were long, long afternoons of absolutely fuck all going on.”

And I too visited the RSC in stratford more often than I care to mention - my kids have never been but they have a richer cultural life than I did = because the things we do are based around their actual interests rather than what they “should” be doing/ something that “sounds good”

To the poster who said “oh yes but the holidays are really long” but also really boring because you don’t necessarily have friends where you live and you’re trying to inhale and soak up all the “homeyness” of home -and store it up to last you while you’re back in the institution.

And to @mark19735 who said ‘For instance, I can't see the logical difference between sending an 11 year old to boarding school and taking an 11 year old into care - and you never get threads asking about whether the latter is a great experience for a child - everyone presumes that it's awful. Why is that?

I have never read it in those terms before and the institutional nature of the care received at boarding school is so so true. Has really hit home.

That said, I completely agree also with @cathpot I too “do not talk about this with my parents because I don’t want them to feel bad because they made the choices they did with love and because it’s in the past and nothing can be done about it now.”

And yes, also lots of proud parents 'I think it's very common f'or parents to be delighted that their children are boarding and harp on about it to them being such a great opportunity/sacrifice, how lucky they are, so the children cannot voice their real thoughts without seeming ungrateful.’
I had been fed such a diet of Mallory Towers and that boarding is brilliant that I was desperate to go - I remember telling my primary peers that I was going away and they were horrified and I was so proud of the attention and how “special I was”

And even twenty five years later, my mother seems to be cross that we don’t have a tradition of “going home for Sunday lunch” but we weren’t there for 8 months of the year so it wasn’t ever a thing so why would it be now we’re adults?!?

So I may need to look into the stately home threads too.

What I would say in answer to the OP about whether boarding is a good thing? Yes now versus 30 years ago there is Facetime and easier to see people but I would also 100% never send my child away to board until at least 16 because those people just aren't you.

@CTRALTDEL What are your feelings about children who are at superb boarding schools with scholarships topped up with bursaries (because these are the only schools which offer such things) which mean they pay no fees at all?

The facilities a school might offer is neither here nor there. Bursaries are neither here nor there. No amount of facilities compensate a child who needs emotional support and is not getting it, and no school , however fabulous , can replicate the sort of emotional support a decent family environment provides.

I don’t know how I would have turned out if I had stayed at home. There were some very sensible pragmatic reasons to argue that boarding was the best option for our expat family situation. I am a perfectly content functional member of society and a good mum to my children so you could argue that it all turned out ok. But I was changed by the experience, and had to shut down emotional links to my parents far earlier than you would probably hope in order to be ok at school.

Children who are happy at school ( and you often see parents saying ‘ well X loves school and chooses to stay at weekends ‘ etc) are precisely the ones who have successfully disengaged and become emotionally self sufficient . I think anyone who decides on balance it is better to send their kids away needs to be honest about this aspect of boarding and I don’t think they are. I have yet to have a conversation in real life or read on these sorts of threads a parent in favour of boarding speaking frankly about it actually means to be happy while away from your family. It is perfectly possibly after a while to reach a state where you love your parents but don’t need to see them very often , and be happy to chat on the phone but not rely on them day to day for support- that’s what a happy boarding school child looks like. I happen to want that for my DD at 18 rather than 13.

Thanks to so many articulate posters on this thread. I always find these threads helpful.

Stability is a theme that comes up time and time again. Boarding means leaving behind your home town, all your clubs, connections, every routine from the moment you wake until your light goes off. You work hard to make new, replacement connections, hobbies etc but then you walk away at 18 and leave it all behind again. But that's ok, you can start again because you are lucky enough to have mastered Independence, Resilience and Self-Reliance.

In my case, in those intervening years of "new but temporary stability" I slept in 24 different beds, with 24 different groups of peers. It's ongoing loss and change, ongoing high alert. As I think @TimingIsABitch said, it's only a substitute for stability.

@Cathpot your point about emotional self-sufficiency is very well made. I think the much-vaunted practical self-sufficiency is also a bit too good to be true. Early self-reliance can come from knowing no one will help, that it's all on you, and that is not healthy. It's not something my parents would recognise as they are confident they "allowed me to choose for myself" a school with "excellent pastoral care" and "superb facilities". But they didn't know that I ran away into the woods where we weren't allowed to go alone, that I didn't brush my teeth for weeks, that age 11 I had trouble managing all my laundry and would run out of clean tights. It's not the running out of tights or the unbrushed teeth that's really the problem, it's the self esteem bashing that comes from knowing that you're on your own and it's all your own fault. In hindsight, maybe I should have had a bit more input and support.

There are some really good posts here, a lot of people get it.

Has anyone seen the documentary ''? It follows a group of young boys starting at a fancy boarding school and sees how they change. You see parents giggling about their son's tears and desperation to not go and another boy's emotional severance from his family, though he thinks he's 'grown up'. Yes, lad, I thought the same, but maybe you'll figure it out later. There's another part where a man is saying that his mother sent him because his father had died and he makes the point that, for him, being sent away meant he lost his mother too. The film brings up strong emotions in parts but is well worth a watch.

@StanleyBriggs

You work hard to make new, replacement connections, hobbies etc but then you walk away at 18 and leave it all behind again. But that's ok, you can start again because you are lucky enough to have mastered Independence, Resilience and Self-Reliance.

This right here. I completely fell apart at university.

@GabrielleChanel WHY did your parents send you away at that age. What was their rationale?

'@CTRALTDEL What are your feelings about children who are at superb boarding schools with scholarships topped up with bursaries (because these are the only schools which offer such things) which mean they pay no fees at all?'

What, all 2 of them? Well done those very, very, very FEW kids getting a free ride - but quite frankly as a parent I would have kept my clearly incredibly bright child a million miles away from a boarding school and either watch them excel in a state school, asking teachers for help to challenge this extraordinary child or found a local private school to see if they would also offer a scholarship.

It's pretty insulting for people to argue that bright kids can't do well in state schools.

'superb boarding schools'

That's a contradiction if I ever heard one. 'Superb' and boarding school really don't belong in the same sentence. Having a private zoo and 4 rugger pitches and a 50m swimming pool doesn't make a school 'superb' - it makes it exceptionally well resourced.

That's all.

Just watched the video and it's heartbreaking.

The line that stuck with me was about sending young children to live somewhere without love for 3/4 of the year at an age where love should be such a fundamental part of their emotional development and their lives.

That was a hard watch. Some of the women in it beggar belief - virtually everything the one in the green top said to justify sending her child away I found repugnant as a parent. And Harry’s mum at the end extricating herself from his embrace, him not wanting to let go, was heartbreaking.

The one thing that stuck out for me was the idea that they weren’t mixing with “yobbos” and that they were getting the finest education. I believed the education bit until I left aged 14. I went to a boarding school attended by royalty and was top or near top of every class. When I went to the local comp afterwards I was shocked at being average in class , assuming that my education had been superior.

God that is a hard watch. And it shows clearly that nicer food and nicer beds is not the main issue. It is being away from your family and living in an institution.