Dear Parent,

Are you considering Boarding School for your child? Have you walked around the grounds on an open day and seen the theatre with its proper lighting rig, the playing fields running down to the trees, a classroom with smaller class sizes.  Maybe you have even watched the modern day marketing tool of Instagram and watched the reels: children laughing on a lawn, a choir in a candlelit chapel, a rowing crew cutting through early morning mist. Somewhere among all of it sits a decision about your child.

My work is with adults who boarded as children. The majority of them weren't bullied or abused.

Many of them had a good time at school, and a lot of what I hear never makes it into a brochure. It feels really important for parents to be aware of all the pros and cons before they can make a decision so it doesn't cause the difficuloties that I encounter daily for both the grown up children and their families. 

Firstly, I understand why boarding appeals, and I do not dismiss any of it.

The classes are small. The teaching can be excellent and the exam results are strong. The facilities are often extraordinary, which means a child can discover the stage, the art room, the orchestra or the hockey pitch without anyone having to drive them there. If you work full time, the after school run is its own kind of exhausting: one child to swimming, another to drama, supper at eight. At boarding school, everything is on site.

If you live abroad, or serve in the forces, boarding can look like the only way to keep your child in the British education system, give them a route into a British university, and hold on to their connection with home.

Perhaps your child is an only child and you want them to grow up surrounded by other children. Perhaps you are raising them alone while working full time, and you know exactly how hard that is. Perhaps your husband or wife has died, and you hope school might offer your child the role models that parent would have been. Perhaps you worry that you cannot give them enough stimulation at home.

You may also have noticed that children from public schools seem to carry a certain confidence into interviews and careers, and that they move easily into particular kinds of work. You want those doors open for your child.

All of this may be true. When a child makes good friends and enjoys school, they often do very well. What follows is not about schools that fail children.

It is what I see in the Therapy room, often decades later, in people who would tell you their school days were happy.

How a child adapts

The separation from family begins the day a child goes away. To be all right at boarding school, a child needs to attach to the school itself and to the children around them. The school becomes their family. This is how a child copes, and it has consequences.

Brothers and sisters can grow apart, even when they attend the same school. The peer group comes to matter more than siblings, and a quiet division opens up between them.

Coming home as a visitor

When the holidays come, your child returns home. Over time, home can start to feel like somewhere they visit. They are not there for the rituals: carving the pumpkin at Halloween, a sibling's birthday tea, the ordinary Tuesdays that make a childhood. Those are the memory points that tell a person where they come from, and boarders often have fewer of them. The bedroom that was theirs becomes a room they sleep in.

Their private life often stays at school. Phone calls become reports: the match was won, the test went well, the food is fine. You cannot see their face when they come down to breakfast, or notice a shift in how they hold themselves after a hard day. Days pass, then weeks. When you see them at an exeat or a half term, you meet how they are on that particular day. The everyday, where so much of a child's inner life shows itself, happens out of your sight.

Leaving at eighteen

Children who grow up mostly in an institution may not develop a strong sense of where they are from. When school ends at eighteen, many feel lost, with no clear home to return to. In adult life, a lot of former boarders settle far from their parents, sometimes in another country entirely, because no particular place feels like theirs. One quiet consequence is that your grandchildren may grow up on the other side of the world.

What it can mean later on

The thing adults most often come to me for is relationship difficulties. Boarders learn how to be close to people largely from their peers, rather than from watching their parents navigate a relationship day after day. Partnership can feel like a language they were never taught.

Feelings are often the first thing a boarding child learns to keep to themselves. As adults, many find it hard even to know what they need, let alone ask for it. I hear this from couples all the time. A child at home has a parent who notices, asks what they need, and helps them find the words for it. That is how the skill is learned.

In a family, a child also learns rupture and repair: you can fall out with someone at bedtime and know you are still loved at breakfast. Many boarders never learn this, and grow into adults who are frightened of conflict.

When they become parents themselves, the difficulty shows again. Some send their own children away because they know no other way. Others try to raise them at home with little to draw on, having grown up in a place where success, career and achievement were the measure of a person.

When school is not happy

Everything above can happen after a good experience. Some children are bullied, or struggle in ways no one notices, and with no parent close by they learn to cope alone. As adults, they often find it very hard to ask for help or to trust that help will come. They manage everything themselves, because that is what kept them safe.

If you do choose boarding

None of this means boarding is the wrong choice for your family. It means going in with your eyes open, and staying close in ways the distance makes harder.

When your child says "I'm fine, we won at hockey", go gently beneath it. Ask how they are. Ask how they are finding the dormitory, what it is like with their friends, whether anything else is going on. Most of all, let them know that whatever they tell you will not disappoint you, and that the sport and the grades are not the only things you want to hear about.

Boarding schools are often competitive places, and children can come to believe their worth depends on their success, on the pitch or in the exam hall. What a child needs to know is that they are loved for who they are, not only for what they do. That knowledge is what lets them thrive as adults.

With warmth,

Amelia