Should I send dd to boarding school a year or early

[Kira4]

Have been through big changes as a family as my x and I split almost two years ago. The split was amicable, we’ve stayed on good terms largely and we’ve shared custody 50/50 but my relationship with our eldest daughter who is now 11 has suffered during and ever since the breakup.

We have moved around quite a bit because of our jobs and have been in Spain now for a few years. Dd had already been in international schools and she picks up languages quickly and had no problems settling here. As it not unlikely that we (now separately) will end up moving again at some point, we’d always said we’d consider a British boarding school eventually for the girls so they’d have greater consistency to finish their education.

A few months ago, dd decided to stay full time with my x. I accepted this at the time if it made her happier but presumed it would be temporary. She’s now stopped wanting to even see me at weekends because she’s got so many things on but also because she’s grown very close to my x’s new gf. They seem to regularly do things just the two of them, they speak Catalan together which neither me nor my x speak and dd just seems to think the sun shines out of her. I recently saw photos and videos from a camping trip they went on with friends and dd is bubbly and affectionate with the gf in a way she hasn’t been with me since she was a little kid.

I can’t fault the gf really because she does seem to be kind, whenever I’ve met her she’s been nice and she never overstepped the mark until dd moved in fulltime (I don’t know exactly how much time gf spends at the apartment but I presume it’s a lot).

I speak with my x about dd all the time(can’t fault their parenting) but afraid to bring up the relationship with the gf too much in case it turns into a row and/or they just think I’m jealous of the new relationship- I’m jealous of her relationship with my dd but not with my x.

Im worried any chance I have of salvaging/building my relationship with our eldest before she hits her teens will be lost if we continue like this. I’d like to send her back to England to a school I know she’d love that’s close to my family. I have family connections with the school and could get her a place for next year if we got the ball rolling soon but not sure how to pitch it to my x that now is the right time?

OP you mentioned at some point that you feel you treated your daughter as if she was older than she actually is because she was behaving as a teenager. She was 9 at the time of the divorce and nowhere near a teenager. She’s not quite there now either. If I were you I would seek professional support to help me get perspective and repair my relationship with my daughter. There are excellent professionals in Spain, and you probably have very good insurance coverage, make the most of it.

Honestly I get where you’re coming from but it might just end up making your relationship worse. You are her mum, all you can do is always be there for her and I promise she will come back to you. My parents split up when I was that age, and honestly I did some pretty stupid stuff to hit out at them both. Now I know it wasn’t fair on them but there was nothing they could have done to make it better.

OP

You need to put breaks on here before you fuck it all up. She's coming up to a trying age. Text her every morning, keep conversation light and airy. Don't force your opinions on what you want her to do on her. That makes it all about you.

Ask her how she is, what she's got going on in her life, ask her about any new hobbies she's picked up. Ask her about that girlfriend and how that's going. How's her dad? Pets? School? Music or bands she's into... if you do this right there are so many ways to reconnect with her. What you want to do is bulldoze her life.

She's growing. And with growth comes change. It's difficult to accept, but you need to realise she's morphong into her own person with her own thoughts, feelings and opinions of what she wants from HER life. Don't dictate to her what you want her to do. How will that end? How will she react to that?

Would it bring you closer if you yank her from everything she seemingly loves and dump her into a boarding school here in the UK?

Enough people have commented on boarding school not being the right thing for your daughter now.
I wanted to share that with my own child there was a period when he was around 12 where I felt like you, that I was losing my boy. We had none of the trauma your family have had, but we had a second child so a 10 year age gap and he was feeling lost. So I booked a trip for just me and my boy, he wanted to go to New York so that’s what we did. The 5 days away just me and him improved our relationship no end and I now know that sometimes that one on one time is needed and something I would reccomend to my friends if they were struggling. It doesn’t have to be as extravagant as New York but a trip somewhere new for you and your daughter to explore.

Please don't ever say or even think the phrase 'child free weekend'. You are a parent - you don't get to arrange your life so that you get 'child free weekends' to suit you. As a child of divorced parents, one of the most hurtful, awful things was hearing my parents negotiate for 'child free' time. Something to be aspired to. You are NEVER child free.

(My parents get plenty of it now though - and grandchild-free time - as we have a shitty relationship thanks largely to their behaviour.)

This reminds me of hearing a dad telling his son it was time to get home as it was mummy’s turn to look after him now and it was daddy’s turn for a break.

I’m all for more involved dads and equal parenting, but this preoccupation with treating kids like a job to be divvied up has got to be damaging to their little psyches. I mean do it but don’t tell them!

I can imagine the heartbreak of feeling that your child is somewhat rejecting you, it must be painful and I understand that this is following the challenges you would have all experienced before, during and after the divorce.
Is it possible that your daughter is trying to express the anger she has been feeling because of the breakup by punishing and rejecting you?
I know that as parents we all want to believe that children are resilient, they can adapt, they will forget and so on. However, my own personal and professional experience tells me otherwise. Children’s experience needs to also be validated, acknowledged and respected.
I believe that to attempt resolving the difficulties you are experiencing with her by removing her from an environment, where she has a support network and feels at home, could be a mistake. You say that you know that she will eventually enjoy the school back in the UK. That may be true and that may not solve the issues in your relationship with her. She may still want to enjoy time with other people rather than you. Perhaps something is broken between you two and you can fix it by paying attention to what she is trying to communicate to you through her behavior. You could start by opening up about your feelings as you experience sadness that she is not willing to spend time with you. She may then feel allowed to open up too.

Kindly, only because she's still young. She may well change her approach to you when she's older.

All the evidence shows that children benefit from having more loving adult figures in their life. 1 more won't hurt.

You can't just rip your daughter away out of jealousy, especially if you're not prepared to sacrifice prestige (prestigious school) and put in actual time and effort to spend time with your daughter and make it enjoyable for her. (Yes, she doesn't like your company atm, but your approach of chucking her into boarding immediately is hardly going to help that.)

You asked for perspectives. I was your daughter, growing up in between worlds, and my mother (who claims to be loving and is/was, but also emotionally stunted like you) always had odd solutions like you, mostly throwing money at problems.

"I don’t think she is genuinely happy tbh" is bonkers. Of course she's happy. All children (even teens) want is a stable, loving figure. That makes them happier than all the fancy stuff in the world.

Just because she's a troubled teen doesn't undermine that. If anything, it makes it more important. I still remember the year at 16 or 17 when my dad was laid off from his CEO-level job and was actually in the same country as us. My parents probably find that the harshest year to look back on, yet it was genuinely the happiest year of my entire teens.

Even then, she may have underlying fears around the temporariness of her dad's gf, or she may have mixed feelings of resentment towards you... Still, none of whatever Evil Stepmother move (even though ironically, you're the birth mother) are planning is going to fix that.

I 100% get the boarding advice for education & career prospects in the long term, but consider 2 things –

1. Now is probably not the time. She'll probably gain more mental health issues + resent you for a long time.

If you're afraid she'll get "too used" to her current situation and want to rip off the band-aid and bring her over before it's too late, perhaps consider a transition period of actually living with your family (as opposed to strangers, no matter how lovely you find them) first.

2. If she's happy where she is, maybe it might be more pragmatic and beneficial in the long run for her to stay there. Boarding school doesn't mean your life is necessarily going to be perfect or even good.

I know plenty of boarding school people who have stuffed up their life badly (some literally, i.e. died young, by their own hand) because of childhood dysfunction.

Your family loves you because you're you. Love is unconditional.

Whereas at boarding school, older students and teachers often take a special shine to certain students. And survival (emotional & practical) depends on gaining the favour of teachers and students around you.

No matter how cosy a certain boarding school looks like on the outside, boarding school inevitably forms your worldview of love, attention etc as prizes linked with scarcity and competition.

Of course less so for those with a present, loving – i.e. actively shows you they love you by making you happy, not just claims to love you – family, with no adverse childhood events, but I still believe they absorb that worldview.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read it. Wish I could say it had occurred to me but it never had. Don’t think it’s the sole issue but could definitely be part of what’s going on. Thank you for this.

No. You’re being spiteful and jealous and putting your own feelings way above your daughters. This is awful. There are reasons why she’s lost to you at the moment and I think that’s probably more your fault than hers. As she grows up and matures she may come back to you, and you can try and re build your relationship. But if you do this horrible cruel thing to tear her away from someone she’s attached to, after all she’s been through, just to help your jealous feelings, she’ll likely hate you, forever.

It would be a wicked cruel thing to do, and I doubt she would ever forgive you. Not exactly the result you say you want of bringing the two of you closer. I think the result you want is to separate her from the new girlfriend. Kind of evil, really.

I think that you need to let go of your jealousy about the GF. From what you write the GF is not trying to usurp your parental role but has taken on the role of older, "fun" cousin/aunt/family friend (doing silly dances, making daft videos ...). Kids often need someone who can just be fun, in the moment and non-judgemental - especially your DD who has been a period of stressful family breakup.

You mentioned in a previous post that your ex/dd think you are too controlling. So think about that - are you controlling? Have you been judgemental about dd or complaining that she is like her father? Because I've seen this play out in the family of one of my own dd's oldest friends and it permanently damaged the mother-daughter relationship to the extent that now in her 20s she barely speaks to her mother and they live 10,000km apart. The main issues between my dds friend and her mum were frequent country and house moves, changing schools, jealousy that she preferred to live with her dad and trying to micro manage her life to suit the mum's ambitions.

One thing I don't understand is why you are so reluctant to see your dd without her siblings present? Girls of her age absolutely need 1:1 time with their mum so you are being really short sighted to lump her in with the others when your relationship is bad. Having her siblings present invariably means that her time with you is limited by what they can/want to do. She is at the age where she needs to feel important to you. Also 11 is the age when she will start to drift away from parents and towards friends anyway. So why not focus on starting small and encourage your daughter to spend an evening/night 1:1 on one of the days when her siblings are with your ex and focus just on her - what would she like to do just for her? Dinner out? Cinema? Swimming? Event? Lounging on the sofa watching a box set?

But she is obviously very happy where she is why change that?

@Lunde i wouldn’t describe myself as a controlling person generally but did become moreso as a stress response to break up. D and I clashed because I got tougher on her when she needed the opposite and she responded by rebelling further and it became a vicious circle. I was too tough on her looking back when she needed patience.

Im not against having d on her own at all and would love to but she won’t have it. What I was saying about weekend arrangements was that girls going to x collectively on alternate weekends meant gf stayed away. I’d be thrilled if d would come to me on her own during the week or on a weekend.

Isn't sending her to another country specifically to reduce her friendship with the gf as controlling an action as you can get...

I mean it's not even just a bit controlling, it's about as controlling as you can get really.

Kira4 I don't have any experience of a marriage break up or having to move around a lot, but I do have experience of raising two girls who act out and generally push against the people who love them most (mostly the Mother). My older daughter had a lot of antipathy towards me between the ages of about 9 and 13. I don't think I handled it as well as I could have done - I thought that if she didn't want to have much to do with me, I should respect that decision and in hindsight, I think that was the wrong approach. She is now 20 and has come way out the other side, but still seems to have more of an affinity with her Dad than with me.

My younger daughter is 12 and has gone almost overnight from being a Mummy's girl to thinking I'm the most embarrassing person ever - she wants me when she wants something (eg picking up from school - she hates walking), but if she doesn't want anything will more often than not tell me to go away. I'm taking a different approach this time - if she tells me to go away that's fine, but she gets a text instead telling her what I wanted to say and letting her know I love her and am there if she changes her mind.

I think you just have to keep the lines of communication open with your daughter - Keep inviting her for the weekend or for activities or whatever however much she says no - she will probably surprise you and say yes one day. Let her bring a friend with her if she wants to, invite her over on the other weekends when her Dad's girlfriend isn't there and also on evenings after school. If you do something with her sisters - invite her too. Maybe pick her up from school in a Friday and take her to your house for as long as she is happy to say. Text her pictures, funny stories, say hello and goodnight, say you hope she has a good day at school etc etc play the long game and she will almost certainly come round eventually.

I wouldn't be sending her to boarding school unless she herself wants to go. Good luck

@Jadebanditchillipepper thanks, that’s helpful. I think I haven’t been prepared enough for this age and stage she’s in and none of my close friends or siblings have kids as old as her yet either

DD sees the gf as a friend, and she’s still resentful at you and her dad for splitting and ruining her life (of course you haven’t, but at 11 this is what she thinks). You say you’re still seeing her so do better when you’re with her. Did you actually think sending her to another country would fix your relationship? Try harder.

The issue is seeing you and gf as mutually exclusive in your DD's life due to jealousy. Both can coexist. Taking her away from gf is not going to make DD start liking you any more.

I understand not wanting her to ONLY have gf as gf may be temporary and isn't her real mum, but again it's not 1 or the other.

If gf was a bad influence I'd understand taking her away but she's not.

I know this is neither here nor there but I was just reading about how Diana fired most of Will and Harry's nannies out of jealousy, which was traumatising for the boys. The thing is, Will & Harry invited their beloved nannies to their wedding, became the nanny's child's godfathers, etc. I think it's a mistake to assume the bond between children and a non-parental figure is artificial just because it's formed in a tumultuous time and the child is young. If only Diana had seen that the boys loved/needed her in their own way, and that she could coexist with the other stable female figures in the boys' lives, it would have saved W&H a lot of damage.

@Jadebanditchillipepper
I wouldn't be sending her to boarding school unless she herself wants to go.

Have I missed it, or has the OP mentioned anywhere that her DD wants to go? I'd never force any child to go to boarding school, I went myself and hated it, though two of my children loved it.
Wanting to separate a child from an ex's GF is not a good reason to send her away. She will have a completely different relationship with her to that which she has with her DM. If this controlling jealousy continues the OP will possibly lose her daughter for life.

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Hi, not really to do with the thread but I am really interested (as a therapist who works with people who went to BS) in what your thoughts were in sending your children when you hated it
No blame, judgement or anything, it would be really helpful for me to understand
You could PM me if you'd like?

Have PM'd you

I think you shouldn’t make any rash decisions yet. Your Ex should really be forcing her to see you as by not doing anything he’s effectively alientating you. How would he feel if you did with the younger daughter?

I also think you need to tell her directly that if she wants to stay in Spain that’s fine. That you will too. I suspect that’s the real reason she’s pushed you out as she doesn’t want to leave the first place she considers home.