The Hidden Costs of Boarding School: Breaking Family Bonds and Dismissing Parental Intuition

When faced with decisions about our children's education, parents are bombarded with glossy brochures, impressive statistics, and the allure of prestige. The boarding school marketing machine is powerful, presenting visions of manicured grounds, outstanding facilities, and "character-building" experiences. Yet what is missing from the brochures is the impact that sending your child to boarding school will have on your own family and further generations to come. 

Going against your instincts

As parents, we are biologically wired to protect, nurture, and remain close to our children. Sending a child away to boarding school requires overriding these fundamental instincts. The marketing promises of "independence," "resilience," and " success" are very persuasive to parents who want what is best for their child and causes them to ignore their own intuition about how much a child needs to be raised by its parents.  

This marketing doesn't just come from the schools themselves. It's reinforced by cultural narratives, family traditions ("It never did me any harm"), and social pressure in certain circles where boarding education is seen as the expected path. Parents can find themselves caught between their natural instinct to protect and society's push to "launch" children into elite institutions that will offer them a promising future.

It is worth considering how this narrative is pushed so strongly in the UK whereas for most other European countries, they do not consider sending their children away.  Do those children end up attached to their mother and never able to leave home and stand on their own two feet?  Why is it so important that children become independent at such a young age.  Surely growing up in a family home with loving parents who nurture, support and care for their child until they are ready to leave as a young adult is what enables a child to become independent and able to step into the world.  When they are organically ready and grown up.

 I currently run a Women's Course and recently many made the realisation that when they left school they were developmentally stuck at the age when they went away to school.  "No wonder I struggled so much in my 20s to navigate the world of relationships and jobs and being an "adult."  "On the outside I looked like I had it all together, but inside I didn't have a clue.  Everything had been done for me at boarding school and suddenly I had to navigate the world without any guidance on how to do it. "

The child's experience of separation.

For the child, regardless of how prestigious the school is or how many sports fields it has, the fundamental experience is one of separation. Children sent to boarding school experience a severance of their attachment to their parents and their home. 

• They learn to suppress their need for comfort and connection
• They develop self-reliance not as a natural developmental milestone, but as a survival mechanism
• They create emotional barriers that protect them from feeling the pain of separation

Many children at boarding school appear to thrive as they excel academically, participate in numerous activities, and build strong friendships. However these achievements often mask a deeper emotional process which is that the child learns that vulnerability equals weakness, that having needs is childish, and that independence requires emotional detachment. This shapes how they show up in relationships as adults. 

A Parent's Loss. 

For parents, sending a child to boarding school means missing the day-to-day rhythms that build deep family connections:

• The unplanned conversations that happen while preparing dinner
• Witnessing your child's small daily triumphs and struggles
• The natural opportunities to provide comfort during difficult moments
• The gradual, organic process of adolescent separation that happens at home

Parents miss the crucial teenage years when relationships evolve through conflict, negotiation, and resolution. Instead of weathering the storms of adolescent rebellion together, which is a challenging but essential part of relationship growth, they receive a polite, distant version of their child during holidays and brief visits.  

Having 3 daughters myself, I know only too well how difficult this period is as a parent when your loving child turns away from you and pushes you to extremes you could not have imagined when they were smaller.  However, I also know how essential this is for their development and that through the arguments and the pushing of boundaries, they develop their own identities and they learn that they can have conflict and it can be repaired.  An essential skill for going into relationships; something I see ex-boarders terrified of.  Sending your children away to school minimises the potential for the personal growth for a parent that happens as a result of parenting.

Geographic Distance

The consequences of this disrupted attachment often only become fully apparent in adulthood.

Ex-boarders frequently establish their adult lives far from their family home. Without deep roots in their "home" community, they feel little connection to their parents' location. Many relocate abroad, feeling more comfortable in places where they can define themselves anew, without the weight of their boarding school experience. Ironically they often feel they they fit in more as an obvious outsider than they do in the UK where they are expected to have a sense of belonging but do not. 

This geographic distance creates yet another loss which is that grandparents are separated from grandchildren, missing the joy of regular involvement in their lives. Meanwhile, the adult ex-boarder faces the challenges of raising children without nearby family support. This support is especially needed having missed the opportunity to absorb parenting skills from their own parents during adolescence. A further loss is siblings living in different locations or countries, which causes their own children to miss out on developing close relationships with their cousins, aunts and uncles. 

Emotional Distance

However, even when living in the same country, many ex-boarders maintain polite but superficial relationships with their parents. They learned not to share their deeper feelings with their parents, having adapted to emotional self-sufficiency at an early age.

Parents may wonder why their adult children don't call more often, why conversations remain on safe topics, or why their relationship lacks the intimacy they observe in other families. The grown up children may also compare their relationship with their parents to other close families, wondering if it is their fault, without making the link to the boarding school decision made decades earlier.

The Delayed Rebellion.

One particularly painful pattern emerges when ex-boarders begin to process their boarding experience in midlife. The healthy rebellion and separation that should have occurred during adolescence sometimes emerges decades later:

• Suppressed anger surfaces, often triggered by becoming parents themselves
• A sudden withdrawal from family relationships as they recognize what was lost
• Resentment that can complicate care decisions when parents become elderly

I've witnessed this painful dynamic in many families: "You weren't there to care for me when I needed you most. Why should I care for you now?" This delayed rebellion can emerge just when parents are most vulnerable, creating confusion and hurt on both sides. Many of my clients still carry the "fear of upsetting mother," so keep a distance or wait until they die before they start to heal themselves. 

Breaking the Cycle.

Awareness is the first step toward healing these wounds. For parents considering boarding school for their children, I encourage you to look beneath the glossy brochures.

• Listen to your parental instincts beneath the marketing messages
• Consider what daily family life means for development and attachment and do some research. 
• Recognize that academic and career success can come through many educational paths
• Acknowledge the irreplaceable value of family bonds during formative years. A house parent to 50 children cannot replace a parent.  

For adults who attended boarding school, understanding these patterns can be the beginning of healing. Many find that they need to grieve the relationship they never had with their parents before they can build something new, whether with their parents if still living, or in their own parenting.

For parents whose adult children seem distant after boarding school experiences, opening space for honest conversation about those years can sometimes begin to bridge the gap, though this requires willingness to hear difficult truths with compassion and without defence

I am aware that for some children their homelife is so chaotic that boarding may be the preferable and safest option for them. However we still need to be aware that there are consequences of growing up in an institution that need to be acknowledged so that they don’t spill out unconsciously into their adult relationships and cause them shame as they feel they were “privileged” to go to boarding school. 

The Relationships that could have been.

Perhaps the greatest loss of all is not knowing how your relationships may have developed had the family remained intact during those crucial years. The comfortable closeness, the hard-won understanding after teenage arguments, the adult friendship that grows from shared history.

Beyond any academic credential or career advantage, these relationships give us a sense of identity and who we are.  They build our self-worth and self-esteem. Before sending children away to boarding school, parents need to consider not just what might be gained, but also what may be lost. Siblings growing up alongside each other, rather than separated and growing up as strangers. The everyday moments that create the tapestry of family connection that can support us throughout our lives. 

No glossy brochure will ever mention this cost, but acknowledging it might be the most important factor in this significant educational decision.