The mental trauma caused by boarding

I thought they taught debating skills and suchlike at expensive private schools

@GodessOfThunder So is your problem with boarding schools, or with all independent schools?

We could all provide links endlessly to research which backs up our own prejudices. Human discussion, though, doesn't just involve swapping research links (interesting as these can be). I would like to know why you, as an individual, think you can speak for the people on this thread who have said that they and their children had/are having a fantastic time at boarding school and still had/have close and warm relationships with their families. Do you think these people are lying, or that they are living in some kind of 'false consciousness'?

Why do you think you know better than the people whose lived experience doesn't correspond to your blinkered views?

In 1998, there were 772 private-sector boarding schools in the United Kingdom with over 100,000 children attending them: slightly over 1% of British children boarded. Currently there are around 500 private-sector boarding schools and 34 state boarding schools with less than 70,000 attending them, of which around 28,000 are from overseas and 40,000 are from the UK, or roughly 0.5% of british children. This quantifies the long-term decline of boarding.
One contributing factor is the growth of good quality international schools which means ex-pats (diplomats, embassy staff etc) no longer have the same need to repatriate their children to get a good education. Another is affordability: cost of a boarding place trebled in real terms from 1980 to 2016. But apparently as numbers of UK boarders fall off, they are replaced by increasing numbers from China and elsewhere to keep the number of boarders roughly constant. If this trend were to continue for another 20 years, a small number of British boarding schools would continue to exist, but as finishing schools for the scions of foreign oligarchs with hardly a British student in sight.

There is an interesting historical summary of independent schooling here: https://sesc.hist.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Briefing-paper-Independents.pdf which touches on boarding. To quote from this : "In the wake of B. M. Spinley’s 1953 study, which found distinct similarities of character between public school boarders and ‘slum children’, many of the schools slowly started to change" - possibly the earliest reference to boarding school syndrome.

To slightly mis-quote you: Accusing someone [...] of sounding like Michael Gove and the other Brexit loons is both childish and wholly undermining of your credibility.

One reason there has not been much research published about people who had a pretty nice time at boarding school is that it's a non-event. In the same way that there's not much research published that says: "my children had a great time, made lots of friends, went on some fantastic trips and were in two sports teams at their local school".

It's great, but it isn't particularly newsworthy or worthy of publication.

In years to come, there may be more research done which focuses on the pupils who have flourished at boarding school, just as a response to the 'old' research. But it may just be the case that there's not that much to say about it.

You should just admit that you are dyed-in-the-wool prejudiced and stop trying to claim that you are doing anything other than airing your views, which are based on precisely zilch personal experience.

There are many activities in life that damage some, but not all, of their participants, and we deem that cause for concern

I would say that "going to school at all" was one of those activities. Still, most of us continue to send our children to schools in one form or another.

Corporeal punishment is this a reverse?

Fair enough OP - and I’m sorry for making a less than constructive point about a typo.

So, if you believe that any school can be damaging, why inflict it 24/7 on children and put them in a position where they can't escape the negativity of school. You have rather blown apart your own argument

I don't think she has at all. Quite the opposite. The key is in the 'some but not all' surely. I don't think even the biggest fan of a boarding education would say it's right for all.

I am a fan of boarding for my dc who went to a specialist school, but it wouldn’t have suited dc2 at all. Dc3 might go in 6th form if she wants to.

@Legoninjago1 I think you have missed the point I was making. I was commenting on boardingschoolmater's comment not the original one with 'some but not all' in it.

Thinks she's also saying some but not all.

Finding people who think they flourished at boarding school wouldn’t be hard. I was popular and sporty and clever and got excellent exam results and a place at medical school. But just like my DH who was beaten at grammar school you shouldn’t take my word for it that “it did me no harm “
In my fifties I had a crisis and started counselling and was startled that the therapist linked my issues to boarding school. This was the first I had ever heard of the damage it can cause. I am fiercely independent and prior to counselling was brittle and quick to anger if challenged. I had abandonment issues and was very unemotional. I am not close to my parents or siblings.I have grown and softened and become much more in touch with my feelings since the therapy. It did harm me but recognising that has taken a lot of effort.

My brothers both boarded and superficially it would seem that it was an excellent grounding academically and socially. They are very successful in their professional lives, have their own lovely families and have wide social circles. They too have realised in their thirties that they have deep abandonment issues and that they both struggle to form deep emotional attachments. Both have been in therapy and boarding school has been talked about a lot in these sessions. They both say their emotional trauma has affected their ability to connect emotionally in really important relationships throughout their lives. They tried to protect our parents from all this but my mother said on her death bed that her only real regret in life was that she agreed to send her sons away to boarding school. My sister and I went to very academic, supposedly very pressurised day schools but we have never suffered like our brothers have.

Bear Grylls, who I am sure most people would agree is a “success” spoke about his SAS training and how it gave him flashbacks to the fear and abandonment of being left at Boarding School.
When he told the SAS psychologist he said that he wasn’t the first person to say that.

Yet he sent his son to the same secondary school.

To clear up any confusion: we all want our children to be happy and fulfilled. We make our choices for them, within the constraints of finances, geography and (in some case) ideology, in the hope that this will be the end result. But there is no guarantee of this, whatever school we choose. I was psychologically damaged by school - but I went to a day school. However, it was in the 70s and 80s, when pastoral care was simply non-existent. I didn't tell my parents how unhappy I was because there was no point - we were all pretty unhappy and it was an era when we were expected to keep quiet and not complain. My own children are the absolute reverse of keeping quiet and not complaining, and if they had been unhappy with their schools, I would certainly have known about it (and would have acted on it, because I know how it feels to be miserable at school).

@GodessOfThunder is suggesting that boarding school is the only kind of school which risks causing distress and unhappiness. I think all schools have the potential to do this, and our job is - in so far as we can - to find the school which suits our own individual child best. My children all went to different schools because they are all very different people (and, as mentioned, one only chose to board in the sixth form, when she loved it - but she wouldn't have loved it if we'd forced it upon her before that).

Probably because some families get stuck in the “it’s just the done thing” mindset rather than actually think what the best thing for their child is.

I was a boarder (12-18) and really enjoyed it. Still friends with most of the girls in my year over 30 years on. None of us seem to be traumatised by it. Lots of fond memories. Our houseparents were amazing - lots of warmth and they were very keen to ensure that we were happy and felt cared for. Kept in touch for decades afterwards, they came to weddings etc

Loads of us had siblings there too - and really long school holidays. I never felt I'd been sent away (but did come from a boarding family).

We looked at boarding schools for DD, but ultimately the specialist ones didn't really cater for her, and the normal ones were out of our budget. She was very, very keen and disappointed when it wasn't possible.

She's a music specialist - but nowhere really caters for her particular thing. So instead she has a very long day as we have to fit everything in with specialist teachers outside school. She's never home before 7.30pm and will still do 2-3 hours practice on top of that once she is home. She has an offer to go straight to university at 16 which will come with a load of potential problems to think over.

In many ways she would be a lot happier at a boarding school with other children who share her interests and with a lot more spare time.

I'm flogging a dead horse, but...

But having a large amount of money enables all kinds of damaging behaviours - including sending your children to live apart from you at the time in their lives when it is most beneficial for them to live with you

"Damaging behaviours" are not the preserve of children who come from families with a large amount of money. Any fool knows that.

My personal view is that the early years are the time when it's most beneficial for children to be with a parent 24/7. I would never have sent any of my children to nursery (or a CM or nanny, come to that). All the research into early years would tend to support my view. But I wouldn't start a thread about my concern for small children who attend nursery, because a) I have no personal experience of nurseries; and b) I appreciate that people have many and good reasons to choose to send their children to nursery, and I would be a complete dick if I were to assert that every single one of these children had been damaged by it.