Wednesday night, sending your child, aged 8 to boarding school, do tell me about it as i won't be able to watch!!!

[piratecat]

I couldn't even watch the trailer for it without wanting to weep!

Im half way through watching this. My DD is 4.
Im an ex army wife and was married for 8 years. I that time i lived in 4 different houses ( different counties and a stint in germany )and was just about to move again.

Now im an ex army wife i am incrediably gratful that sending DD to boarding school isnt something that i will ever have to consider.
However, while i was still married it is something that we had spoken about for when she is older. Forces life is incrediably difficult and really the majority of civvies will not even begin to understand. Hell, ive got friends and family who have been close to me thoughout my whole 10 year experience of it, and they just dont get it - AT ALL.

Watching the programme i felt incrediably sad for the girls, and for the mothers. Im not in a position to say if it was for the best or not. But i do know that it wont have been a decision taken lightly, and will have been made with the best intentions. As parents they will just have been doing what they thought was best. Same as us all.

Batteryhuman army kids do not have to board. They have mothers perfectly capable of looking after them. They are perfectly capable of sending them to their local state school which when near to a camp will be well used to dealing with forces kids.

Milamae - i think that probably bs will provide SOME stability in what is a very unstable lifestyle.

With the forces, its not only the constant moving, the DH being away for weeks/months at at time. You never know when they are going, when they are coming back or even when you will next hear from them. My own DH for 40 mins notice for a 9 month tour of iraq. 40 mins noice! if i hadnt happened to be home by chance i wouldnt have been able to say goodbye. i would have gone home to find a note on the table.

On top of that the demands of the job mean constant exercises, weekends, nights, days away, often with very little notice. Its impossible to plan much at all. Pretty much the whole family has to drop everything to support the serving soldier.

Then add in the fact that you are away from family, only a few hours drive if you are lucky... more than that if you are not. It takes time to make friends, then by the time you make them either you or them move on.

Its just a very very unstable lifesytle. Whist it wouldnt be my choice, i can sympathise with the decision they have made.

I dont expect most people can understand that though.

No, children do not have to board - there's the option of the parents living apart and commuting when possible and there's the local state option.

However, as someone earlier in the thread pointed out, getting your child into a decent school can be incredibly difficult when you're moving mid-term or when you only get your address 4-6 weeks in advance. What about a posting that falls slap bang a month before exams (although delays in moving house are sometimes allowed in such cases)? For us, especially, there is the difficulty of ensuring our children get a Catholic education - for which we are prepared to pay privately as a day option if we can't get it through the state.

We had seven houses in as many years as my husband was trickle posted from job to job and the thought of dragging a child through that was not attractive - however, neither is the option of putting them in boarding school. I think that Forces families are often caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to family life - there is no ideal situation.

I may be wrong (and I'm happy to be corrected) but aren't RAF posting a little less infrequent? The couple of people we know in the RAF seem to have a little more stability than our Army colleagues. Perhaps that depends on the job/specialism, though.

When I said that civvies don't understand I was not "bleating" - I was merely pointing out that having your whole life, career, family education placed at the whim of the MoD can be a difficult thing to grasp unless you've gone through it. Much the same way that while one may sympathise with another's situation (whatever that situation may be - divorce, bereavement etc) true understanding only comes if you've been through it yourself. Does that make sense?

My entire childhood was a forces one so I know exactly what it's like. I fail to see how bs would give more stability to a child than living with it's mother. How ridiculous.

I coped with everything you described knowing my mother was always there to tuck me in at night,to reassure me that dad was coming back soon etc. I have so many positive memories of the 3 of us supporting each other and just getting on with things. To have been separated from my mother and sister would have been unbearable and I'm pretty tough.

I agree with you MilaMae. I was trying to understand why the programme only looked at kids from forces families and not the majority of boarding kids who have numerous and more complicated reasons/excuses for being there. The programme was about the girls ability to cope at such a young age and I think they were hoping to skirt over the why they were there to concentrate on the what happened when they arrived.

Jscot believe me RAF postings were very frequent,we had 6 months in one place.

Incidentally, under FAS and the new "super garrison" scheme, there should be a greater degree of stability for the Army. However, the biggest benficiaries of that will be the infantry and some of the larger Corps (Artillery, Engineers, Signals etc). The smaller Corps who serve as "bolt-ons" to Brigade and Div HQs will still be moved from pillar to post on a regular basis.

The thinking is that it will cut down on the need for CEA as people will stay in the same area for longer, it will allow wives/husbands to have a bit more stability in a career and there will be more opporunity to get on the housing ladder.

It hasn't yet come to fruition though and it was beginning to be talked about when my husband was on ICSC(L) five years ago.

Battery I agree, I think they shoved the forces thing in to make more of a story, to get a chink of misguided sympathy for the parents.

Wouldn't have been much of a story focusing on a load of toffs who for generations choose to screw their kids up.

"My entire childhood was a forces one so I know exactly what it's like. I fail to see how bs would give more stability to a child than living with it's mother. How ridiculous."

I'm not saying that you don't know what it's like - clearly you do, you've been "through the system" as it were. Your mother and father amde the best choice for you and it obviously worked and that is a good thing.

However, who's to say that boarding school wouldn't suit a different child in a different set of circumstances? Not me.

All I'm trying to say is that everyone I know whose kids are in boarding school didn't make the decision lightly, just as I'm sure that your parents didn't make their decision lightly.

Although it's hard, we shouldn't really judge, should we?

"Jscot believe me RAF postings were very frequent,we had 6 months in one place."

Our shortest posting was three months (thankfully only the one time!) but our longest was only eighteen months. Seems like all the Services can suffer from truncated postings.

To repeat the point for the millionth time, why can't the mum (or the dad if the mum is in the Forces) stay put in one place and thus provide stability for the children, and the dad visits the family when he can. Why follow the husband around like a "good little wife"?

I see what you mean about moving often causing upheaval, but boarding school does not provide stability under any circumstances. What it does is groom perfectly good children to become emotionally stunted and detached adults.

Lasttrain - do not most married couples actually live together?

I think some people are being a bit OTT in their reaction against boarding school. It completely depends on the child. At 9 I barely missed home at all. But I think 11 or 13 is probably a better age to start. I know quite a few people who went from those ages onwards and I don't know one who didn't have a great time. Boarding school can be really fantastic for a lot of kids.

However in this programme, April was clearly not the right sort of child. Her homesickness went on far too long for my liking. She seemed a bit immature - is it normal for an 8 year old to believe that a rocking horse still has a 'real' horse in it?

I can really see the appeal of boarding school for parents and kids, and would definitely consider sending my (as yet unborn) kids, but not until they are out of prep school. I can imagine it being nice that even though you don't see your kids as much, when you do you can really concentrate on them and do lots of fun things, instead of the daily grind of do your teeth, pick that up, don't hit your sister etc. and being confident that they were being cared for by experts the rest of the time. However if they really hated it after a month or so I would pull them out.

Yes, but couldn't you equally well argue that mothers and children should be living together, hf? To some of us, that might actually seem the relationship that should be prioritised. (and I do know couples who do not live together though they are still together iyswim)

Sailors are in pretty much the same situation as forces men, aren't they, in that they cannot live with their families; many are away at sea for very long periods at a time. And in that situation, their partners stay on land with the family.

Yeh, brahms, you can just get someone else to do that whole brushing your teeth thing and just do the really fun parts of parenting. Sort of like a pick and mix - pick the sweets you like but don't worry about the rest cos someone else will sort that out.

Well why not, as long as the child is happy?

I am also wondering about all these people who are so certain they could never send their child to boarding school. Is it because you are worried that your child would miss you and be unhappy...or worried that they wouldn't? (both are understandable)

Brahms, you said you didnt have any children. I would take a bet and say when and if you do you'll realise what you said was ludicrous.

What? I'm genuinely curious. When I went I felt bad that I didn't miss home, so when my mother asked me if I'd missed her I said yes because I didn't want to hurt her feelings! There must be a worry on some level that you might find out your children don't need you as much as you think they do.

hf cory answered for me. It is more natural for children to live with their mothers than it is for couples to live together. Married couples want to live together, they don't need to. My husband travels on business, and sometimes the trips overlap so he's away for a month at a time. It does not make our relationship any weaker for the regular separations. Being in love with each other does not require you to live in each other's pockets.

And brahms,

Re-read my last post, and I don't want to come across as trivialising the separation of Forces couples by comparing to business trips. I just wanted to point out that couples can be apart for lengthy periods of time and still have a strong marriage

What rainbowinthesky said.

And no, I didn't find April exceptionally immature for an 8-year-old girl.

Lasttrain - I see your point. However where does a Forces family chose to be their base? Near their spouse, near Brize Norton for their flights to Afghan, near their parents/sisters/friends, a 10 minute walk to school?

A lot of these choices come down to finance. If parents or family live in the South East a lot of families can't afford to live there.

Or are you saying they shouldn't live with their spouse or even near their families of friends?

Get a pin and prick it on a map?

to be clear, re abuse. i wouldn't accuse the mothers of abuse, i do think that they were institutionalised and thought they were doing the right thing.

however, i thought that the school's behaviour was a disgrace, and that the head should have been big enough to advise that april should go home. but no, it seemed to me to be all about preserving the status quo at her expense. telling the mother that she was upsetting her child, telling the child that she mustn't cry and upset her mother, that just seems to me to be a massive abuse of power, at the expense of those children.

in a way i was impressed by april's emotional intelligence and the length of time it took them to break her. i hope she's okay.