adjusting to boarding school

lemonade1
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:29:35 +0000

My daughter took a while to adapt to her school. There were good times and low points the entire first year. I’d been expecting her to fall in love with it right away, as she has for summer sleep-away programs, but it didn’t happen (so I had a low grade nagging feeling for months). Her advisor reassured me that sometimes more discriminating (not in a bad way) girls took longer to find true friends, rather than connecting immediately to roommates, etc, and that’s happened. By spring she was reasonably happy, but still not the ecstatic connection to her school that you see from some posters on this board (mom’s low grade guilt continued). Now she’s in her second year (10th grade) and has some lovely friends and seems to be hitting her stride (nagging feeling gone). Through it all, she’s done better academically than I ever imagined (shame on me for underestimating her!). I know that going in as an 11th grader is a different situation, but as the weeks go on I trust that your daughter will make some good friends. It can take a while for it all to kick in, though, even though we want it to be great right away.