Is boarding school good for children?

There is a school of thought that boarding schools, most especially for younger children, set up lifelong relationship problems, seeing adults unable to form deep, lasting, or intimate bonds with those around them.

A leader in the field, and creator of the notion in psychotherapy of ‘Boarding School Syndrome’, is British psychotherapist Joy Schaverien, who, writing in the British Journal of Psychotherapy explains, “like many of my colleagues, I repeatedly witness the blight this experience has cast on the lives of many of the adults who come for psychotherapy.

These adults are from different generations: some were boarders in the 1950s, others in all the decades to the 1990s, and sometimes I see a current boarder”.

Her work, and the work of many other psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists, point to a pattern that boarding school can create where children depart from a norm of relationships based on ‘mutual influence’.

This balanced interaction develops in the home, as children grow up beside their loving and very own parents, in a passage from complete dependency and obedience to full adulthood and responsibility for their own lives.

Say the therapists, the move to boarding school creates an early and false autonomy in an inflexible environment, where the child and later teenager is not heard or influential, nor supported or accepted as themselves.

The impact is that kids effectively go ‘into hiding’, their ‘selves’ hidden, and their ability to connect confidently and holistically with others, or even know or say how they feel, near-permanently impaired.

The thing about psychology is that theories abound, and many brook controversy, which means people must each decide for themselves if placing children in an environment of education, but not love and support, is healthy.

But, in Kenya, the proportion of children that get moved from home into large ‘autonomous’ dormitories, moving into adulthood far from their own home environments, is huge, which makes the issue of how boarding affects psychology a burning one, in a society that most certainly has some fractures.

For sure, the commitment to private boarding, and the way that many parents work and sacrifice to cover the school fees, speak to the deep-seated belief that they are buying their children a better and more successful future - the love in getting kids into the ‘best’ possible school is most definitely sincere and heartfelt.

But if it is true that many boarders become frequently ill with homesickness, grow up largely unhappy, and learn to hide and override their own feelings, is that success bought at too high a personal price?

According to the therapists, boarders are even likely, sometimes, to abandon all the things and people they care most about, throughout their lifetime, as later connections strike too deep and trigger ‘feelings’ – them having grown up repressing all their feelings to survive in the dorm block.

Across all, a point Schaverien makes is that the voice of the child is really unheard in the matter of boarding, with the entire debate and matter of school an engagement by the school and parents alone.

But unhappy kids make a drawing pool for rebellious and self-damaging behaviour, depression and suicide, and, even, at the far less visible end, for a lack of integrity, fidelity and honouring of others.

In reading it all, I absolutely cannot judge the impact of boarding school, as my own children plodded firmly through day school, all the way to 16.

But as therapists globally report the impact as material, and the damage as significant, I only wonder if it’s worth looking at what they say, and at least exploring whether our own child is truly thriving at the school from day one.

Maybe boarding school suits some and not others. But insofar as the aim of every parent is to create the healthiest, most wholesome, and truly most successful adults of all, maybe boarding isn’t something we should simply assume is better.

Maybe it actually is worth looking at a little closer in how our very own children take to it at first – because if they are struggling, their ‘coping mechanisms’ may, indeed, go on to run their lives.