A Conversation to have with New Boarders

Albion
Wed, 31 Jul 2013 11:47:13 +0000

I swear I’m not trying to ring the bells of parental alarm here, but I promised myself last term that I’d make a thread for this before the next school year.

Among all the other things you talk about with your child before the school year starts, there’s one I (as a faculty member at a boarding school ) would like to stress. One of the great things about boarding school is that it challenges students to be independent. Sometimes they take this charge to mean that they need to solve everything–specifically, the mental and physical health of their friends. There’s a lot of pressure at my school to be happy, well-rounded and self-contained. Even though we are not a top ten school (GASP!) there are kids who are hoping to get into the Ivy League and put incredible pressure on themselves to achieve academic perfection. When kids start to show signs of depression, eating disorders, cutting, dangerous sleep deprivation or substance abuse, their closest friends often pay the price.

I had one student who suffered from severe depression and ultimately had to take a medical leave of absence. Then I had to catch and counsel her roommate, who had devoted four months of her life to keeping her roomie/best friend afloat. The second girl blamed herself for not being better, stronger, and more able to care for her best friend. She completely fell apart. I started taking her to the counselor and helped her re-forge friendships and her identity at the school separate from her roommate. I got her parents involved. I’m aware of an additional situation where friends of a student with a dangerous drinking problem loyally kept their mouths shut in order to be good friends–even when their friend was in extreme danger. There are others who make excuses for eating disorders or anger management issues. Good teenagers want to be thought of as good friends and they want to please the adults in their lives by seeming like they have it all together. Sometimes, the way they go about achieving those goals takes a huge toll.

The emotional support that kids provide for each other while away at school is incredibly important. But teenagers need to know that they are not responsible for fixing each other. Please talk with your kids about what to do if their friends start down the path of depression/eating disorders/dangerous drinking/cutting/not sleeping in order to perfect homework/etc. One of the (apparently) most useful things I said this year was that people don’t become counselors unless they have had to deal with difficult issues in their own lives–they are not perfect people who sit in judgment of others; they have chosen a difficult and low-paying profession because their desire to reach out and help people in dark times comes from an understanding of what that means. Honestly, I had six different kids this year tell me that counselors at school “don’t care.” Prepare your kids to think and act otherwise. Prepare them to move beyond the initial resistance that talk of going to the counselor is going to raise. And if all else fails, remind your kid that s/he may also get some relief and comfort from talking strategies with the counselor on how to deal with a friend in trouble.

Obviously, I’m one of those teachers that kids tend to tell things to because they think I’m cool enough to solve it without involving anyone else. Ha Ha! I’m the first one on the phone to counselors and parents, using my false patina of “cool” as a smoke screen for my deep desire to get as many professionals and families in the loop as possible. The faculty have vast networks of eyeballs on kids and we check in with each other frequently to get a fuller picture of how a kid is faring as s/he moves through the different facets of boarding school days. At first, teenagers assumes caring means solving an issue without ever breaking stride, and I have to remind them that as soon as someone is deliberately harming his physical or mental health, then it’s smarter and kinder to stop pretending that things are fine and address the issue with someone who is trained to help. I rely on the lame analogy that if their friend had a broken leg, they would not spend a month cheering that friend up, telling adults the leg was fine, and making make-shift crutches out of leftover chopsticks. Nope, they’d get their friend to the doctor post haste. In almost all cases, by the time it gets to me the situation has been in place for too long, and kids are suffering because they are trying to prop each other up way beyond their ability. I think it’s also important to stress that the desire to solve everything for their friends comes from a really noble impulse to be loyal and helpful. It can be really hard to help teenagers redefine what those words mean–especially when they do not have enough experience with reliable, trustworthy adults.

So please, sit your kids down and let them know that there’s an outside chance that a friend of theirs at school may end up in a difficult place, and that s/he may resort to unsafe behaviors in order to self-medicate. Let your child know that s/he never has to solve his/her friends’ serious, health-harming problems alone. If he’s comfortable taking the friend to the campus doctor or counselor, great. But it’s also completely smart to identify a faculty member that the friend likes and trusts, and get adults involved. The friend may express anger at first, but deep down, there’s some amount of relief. The most loving thing a friend can do–the smartest and most supportive action–is to get a trusted adult involved as soon as possible. Obviously, let your child know that you are more than willing to help plan steps to take over the phone should this come up. You may get an epic eye roll, but you will have been heard.

It may never come up. But if it does, you want kids to be prepared.

Okay, that’s my say. Now we can go back to debating which school has the highest percentage of unicorns prancing across the quads!