Do you feel that life outcomes are different (positively or in challenging ways) for kids that went to boarding schools?
Do they tend to have vastly different lives than those in private day or local public schools?
Do they tend to be “set up” for a smoother life in any way?
Are you glad that you or your child attended/attends a boarding school and specifically for current parents- why are you glad or do you sometimes have regrets that they aren’t in a day school?
In our case, child had opportunities at BS that they would never have had at the public or day schools in our area. We have other children that went to our local private school, and they were fine, but they were ultimately very different children/learners with different interests and it worked for them. I am of firm belief that education is not one size fits all and that what is more important is the individual child. Our private school here was a great fit for our older two children; would not have been a great fit for our BS child.
As far as regrets - we are not in the area where our BS child attends so we rarely have been able to see athletic competitions live, attend concerts, etc. Livestreams have been great but it hasn’t been the same. I don’t know my child’s friends or their parents. That is a change from my other children. If that’s important to you, you need to think about that. While it was nice to have that experience with my older two children I was willing to give up those relationships with my third. (Some of my friends with children in school here actually are envious of our lack of involvement with other parents at my child’s school - didn’t someone once say “hell is other parents”?) But, if you are a parent who is from away and you want to stay well connected to the day-to-day goings on of your child and their school, BS may not be for you. You may feel left out. We are fine with that.
I can also say that the BS college counseling process (at least for us) is far above anything we have available to us at the private or public schools in our area.
Very helpful! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I agree that the choice is 100% dependent on the personality/likes of each child. Mine definitely wants BS so that alone is a huge weight off!
Thank you for this question! We have a great day option in our city and are really hesitating on boarding and wondering how much to influence our child’s decision. For now, we’ve tried to remain neutral on all options and let him take the lead, but as we get closer to M10, we are wondering whether we should influence more towards staying home. He is 50/50 on whether he could be happy living away from home. Sometimes I think just having the regular path of being with family until you are 18 including being with your sibling longer, outweighs any potential benefits of boarding, especially if you have a strong day option. Then you are excited about going away to college and you are mature enough to handle all the potential risks and difficulties. How are you all feeling about this? I am very torn, as I feel once these decisions come out on M10, and if my son gets one of his top choices, he will have a hard time turning down the opportunity. I am just not sure whether we as parents should try to steer him a bit to staying home.
Boarding school alleviated the need for long commutes each day.
Regret that child was raised by others for a significant part of their life.
Regret the loss of social life with other parents/school functions.
Boarding school was appropriate at the time because we were in a period of transition.
Your thinking and concerns closely mirror ours! Excellent day options, a lack of personal/family experience or familiarity with BS, a desire to let our kid ‘drive the bus’ and make her own decisions (informed by and advised by us, her parents). We trust her maturity and ability to succeed and thrive in either environment. We want her to feel that she is the one choosing - maybe the first ‘grown up’ and impactful choice in her life. We struggle with how much to advise, and worry about blurring the line between advice and influence.
Our strategy so far has just been to check in a lot with how she’s experiencing both the process and our involvement. Lots of open ended questions - how’re we doing as your parents in this? What types of things would be helpful for us to talk about with you as you weigh your options and make your choices? etc.
We the parents are very ambivalent, would miss her daily presence dearly, but continue to try to center her preferences and check our biases, hard though it is!
Every child is different, but I would say that the main difference between BS and PDS graduates is that BS kids tend to have a smoother transition to college life, because they already learned to live independently at age 14. They are also more experienced in making decisions and availing themselves of the resources around them. Another common trait among top BS graduates is that they tend to speak well, having been trained around Harkness tables.
All good questions. BS kids don’t have smoother lives or vastly different outcomes from students at other types of schools, but those aren’t the reasons you allow your child to attend. You consider the options based on the fact that:
I have posted my feelings about our son’s BS journey in many places on this board over the years always coming back to the fact that although we missed a lot, our son missed nothing. I posted my early pangs here and several reflective recaps like this one and this one.
BS is long gone from our rear-view mirror, but it was a life-altering choice for our son in a couple of very important ways. First, immersion in a community of high achievers where he was no longer bullied for being academically curious brought out the scholar in him, and the BS sport requirement enabled our unfit zero-sport kid to develop into a varsity rower, something that could not have happened at home in the desert and was critical to his appointment to a service academy. Second, his school taught its students to think deeply about the privilege they’d been given. I will never forget the headmaster’s speech during revisit days warning potential new students that they had better not dare consume a quarter of a million dollars of this world’s goods without considering the weight of that consumption. This message—To him whom much has been given, much is expected—was part of the school culture, and we think our son’s choice of military service was partly a response to that ever-present message.
From our son’s perspective, he is thankful for the strong preparation for college, the deep life-long friendships, and the early independence. He was so ready for the experience and took advantage of all it offered. He has hugged us more than once for this gift and will consider BS for his children when/if the time comes.
I have no regrets about the BS journey itself but, as I posted recently on another thread, I do sometimes regret the inability to know he’d choose the military, and the Army would own him at 18. If I had known then what I know now, I’m not sure I would have allowed our only child to leave for boarding school at 14. He reported to the academy three weeks after BS graduation and never came home again for any length of time. And now he’s married. You can drive a tank through the hole in my heart. We lost him way too soon.
But, for anyone considering boarding school, you must separate how BS will affect you from how it will affect your student. With hindsight, I know that choosing to keep our son with us longer would have been the selfish choice, one made for our benefit not his. However you choose to educate your child, focus on the fit for your student, not how that choice will affect you.
Agreeing with most above, all 4 of my kids have gone to boarding school (as did I). Selfishly I miss them, but they don’t miss long drives to the local private schools and have enjoyed the opportunities bs provided. My two who are already in college report that they were exceptionally well prepared for time management, making presentations and writing compared to their peers.
There are so many factors at play and as others have said, all kids are different, but I doubt BS changes things for kids in the very long run. In the short term, I think it makes college entry much smoother and possibly more successful/less stressful. I went to BS a long long time ago. When I went to college, it was a “no big deal” transition for me, while I observed many of my classmates tasting freedom for the first time and going a bit overboard (drinking/parties, poor time management). Non BS kids eventually get the partying out of their system, or least figure out how to manage it better. BS also offered me exposure to many more educational and EC opportunities and general diversity of ideas and people than I ever would have had in my small New England hometown. I don’t know that I would have come to the career choice that I did without my BS experience, but that is impossible to say for certain. Not that I had a bad relationship with my parents before BS, but I do think that our relationship improved because I was away. I had so many experiences to talk with them about and I missed them(!) so I really appreciated spending time with them when I was home.
My DS stayed at our LPS. He is a great student and will likely do fine when he heads off to college this summer. He will party more than I ever did (easy to do since I never partied!), but he has impressive time management skills from his many years of balancing year round sports with his school work. He is also very good at advocating for himself and understands when he needs to ask for help. While I do think BS would have challenged him more academically and possibly prepared him better for the academics of college, I still think he’ll be very successful.
My DD is a freshman at BS. While she has always been a good student, she does not have quite the same level of self discipline as my DS. One of my biggest hopes for her in going to BS is that she gain proficiency with time management and also learns to advocate for herself. I have already seen growth for her in these areas. At home, she tended to lean on us to keep her on track. She’ll also gain more from the higher academic expectations of BS than she would have at our LPS.
I am glad that my DD is attending BS. She is happy and thriving. We were deliberate in giving her a 3 hour radius to work with so that we could still visit without too much hassle. She chose a great fit school that is 1.5 hours away so we have seen her concerts and plays. I am also happy that I don’t have to “drive in circles” every evening taking her to and from her ECs and social activities. Had my DS gone to BS I would have been very sad to miss his many athletic events. So for that reason, I am also selfishly glad that he stayed home. In general tho, I think my DD simply has more to gain from BS than my DS would have.
2 different kids, 2 different tracks, outcomes pending! As of now, my DS doesn’t regret not going to BS and my DD has no regrets about going away.
I realize that your question was about private day school vs BS, so not the perfect comparison you were asking for. I don’t have any personal experience with PDS, but I assume the PDS kids will get all the academic rigor of a BS but not as much of the learning independence, experiencing increased diversity/new opportunities as at a BS. I may be wrong about that and PDS parents can chime in.
Wow all of these answers are so thoughtful and transparent. I hope every parent internally pondering this question finds this thread. And thank you for pointing out about the day/public school issue. I should have worded the question to incorporate day or public school.
I think that if your child is driving the bus on wanting to go to boarding school - that is the most important thing. For real. That speaks volumes. Also want to add that the maturity that our child has developed in 4 years has been truly exceptional. Yes, BS self-select and are selected into BS because they have a high level of maturity for their age, but even given that the growth is notable. My other children (and their friends) were not this mature their senior year. Good kids but the level of independence and maturity that is possible when one goes to BS - very difficult to replicate in a non BS environment. Obviously there are exceptions but on the whole, I would argue that BS kids on average have an edge on independence and college readiness.
The part about being home with siblings to grow and live together really landed with me. My applicant is the third child, and the siblings left for college years ago. He misses that energy. Our home is quieter now. He is a social creature, and has always been mature. It’s just who he is. As much as we would love for him to have the experience of living with his siblings in high school, it simply isn’t possible. So he wants to live with all of your children instead 
There is obviously more to it than that. We are incredibly close with him. We rarely argue. I actually think this helps him to feel confident our relationship will not simply survive the distance, but deepen because of it.
I did not have enough experience as a parent with the first kids to see how this could play out. With number 3? We are all ready to take this calculated risk and we think it might be brilliant. For him.
I will be sad in many ways, but thrilled for my child. It’s a sacrifice we are prepared to make.
Editing to add: with regard to the original question, I hope the outcome is lifelong friends and an interest in living in various places on the planet. I suspect boarding school nurtures curiosity in a wonderful way.
If we had had a strong day option, boarding school would never have come up in our household.
We had a good discussion a while back with a parent who was Unsure About Boarding School:
Another poster hijacked that thread asking why anyone would send their child to boarding school; it got interesting from this point on.
That was quite a thread, thanks for the link! Did we ever learn where the kid ended up going to high school?
That kid could teach a masterclass in “fit”. Lots of research and visits. Tuned out the noise.
@RoonilWazlib99 can share the name of the school here if inclined.
For DS, BS was perhaps life-altering. Our local day options, public and private, had quite homogeneous populations. His BS, otoh, was uber diverse in every way. He is now many years past that experience but is able to move in and through groups and communities that are truly global, and maintains friendships were formed at a special time of life.
I think that BS offers a gentler on-ramp to independence, but few students fail to launch at college without that, so it’s probably not that meaningful.
It’s a decision every family has to make, and the nature of local options can factor heavily into that. For us, the school DS chose offered SO many things – academic and otherwise --that weren’t part of any of the other options that it made the choice easier.
Ha! So true! She knew exactly what she wanted and was not afraid to choose a school no one had ever heard of in favor of all the “big names” people usually talk about. I’m so curious where the college journey will take her.
@matadorski - My student ended up being accepted at all the schools to which they applied (Emma Willard, Miss Porter’s, Suffield Academy, Millbrook, Proctor Academy, and Pomfret). They chose to attend Proctor based on the hands-on/experiential learning, the kind community, access to the outdoors, breadth of courses available, and the off-campus programs built in to the school.
Sounds like you’ve got a wonderful (youngest) kid - I hope that her experience has exceeded her expectations!
To be fair, most people don’t know most of the boarding schools. I have a friend who laughs about having asked some kid in a freshman college class about Deerfield, thinking it was a town somewhere!
Those who know this universe a bit better thought your list was brilliant!