Should My Child Go to Boarding School? How to Work Through the Decision Together
Last Tuesday night, I found my 15-year-old Lila spread out on our kitchen table, a half-eaten peanut butter granola bar stuck to the corner of a boarding school viewbook, her algebra homework pushed off the edge onto the floor. She looked up, her thumb smudged with pencil graphite, and said, “I still don’t know if I want to do this. Can you help me figure it out?”
We’d been circling this question for three months, ever since her best friend Mia’s family moved across the country for her dad’s job. Lila’s never fit great at our small-town public high school—there are only 120 kids in the whole 10th grade, everyone knows everyone’s business, and the only art class offered is introductory drawing, even though Lila has been selling her landscape paintings at the local farmers market since she was 12. The boarding school she’s looking at has a 4,000 square foot art studio, a portfolio prep program for college, and it’s only 20 minutes from Mia’s new house. On paper, it checks every box. But then she’ll curl up with our old golden retriever Max on the couch after dinner and say she doesn’t know if she can go three months without sleeping in her own bed, or eating my chocolate chip pancakes on Saturday mornings.
We did the official tour back in April, and Lila glowed the whole time—she talked to the art department head for 20 minutes about her work, got a free screen print from the student shop, and couldn’t stop talking about the separate storage lockers for personal canvases. But on the drive home, she went quiet 20 minutes in, stared out the window at the cornfields along the highway, and finally said, “What if I hate it and I’m stuck there?”
I talked to my cousin, who’s a guidance counselor at a suburban high school, and she gave me the first tip that actually helped. She said most tours only show you the nice, polished parts, so you need to have your kid stay overnight, sit through two regular classes, and eat lunch in the cafeteria with current students, no admissions rep hovering. We arranged that a couple of weeks later.
Lila came back with a lot more than just a good feeling. She learned the dorm lights technically go out at 10:30 on weekdays, but the art studio is open till midnight for kids working on portfolios, so she can paint as late as she wants. She also learned that the shared bathroom down the hall has three showers, and only two people usually use them before 7:30 a.m., so she wouldn’t have to wait forever to get ready. The annoying thing she found out? Her prospective roommate plays varsity soccer and leaves her muddy cleats right by the door, and Lila hates that kind of messy. But that’s a small thing, we figured—she can ask to switch roommates at midterm if it’s really that big of a problem.
After that, we sat down and made a list, but not the generic pros and cons most people talk about. We split every point into two categories: things you can change, and things you can’t. Pros like “access to advanced art classes” went into unchangeable at our current school, so that’s a solid point for boarding. Cons like “shared bathroom” went into changeable, because she can adjust her shower time or buy a caddy to keep all her stuff separate. The big con Lila had—“I miss Max and Mom” — went up to unchangeable, but we added a note: you can come home every third weekend, the school allows that, and we can FaceTime every night if you want.
I admitted something to Lila that I hadn’t said out loud before: I was scared too. I found myself walking past her empty room when she was on her overnight stay, and I almost texted her three times just to say goodnight. Part of me didn’t want her to go, not because I thought it was bad for her, but because I didn’t want our daily routine to change. That’s okay, I told her—my feelings don’t have to be her feelings. She didn’t have to stay just because I didn’t want her to leave.
Next, we mapped out an exit plan. A lot of people treat boarding school like a forever decision once you sign the enrollment papers, so we talked through exactly what would happen if she hated it after the first semester. I called our current high school principal, and he said he’d hold her spot for the second semester no matter what. I called the boarding school admissions office, and they confirmed that half the tuition is refundable if you leave before the second semester starts. It’s not a one-way door, we told her. You can try it, and if it doesn’t work, you come home. No one will think it’s a failure, no one will be mad. After we talked that through, Lila relaxed. She stopped picking at the edge of the viewbook, and said that was the thing bugging her this whole time—she thought if she said yes and then hated it, we’d be disappointed.
The application deadline is next Friday, and her application is almost filled out. She still says she’s scared some days. Last night she was sitting on the couch with Max, and said she doesn’t know what she’ll do if she doesn’t make friends the first week, and has to eat lunch alone. I didn’t tell her “it’ll be fine” or “you’ll make tons of friends.” I just said that if she does eat alone the first week, she can text me, and I’ll drive down to take her out for burgers.
We don’t have a final answer yet. She’s leaning toward going, but she still has a few days to change her mind. The three small, concrete steps we took—overnight stay instead of just a tour, splitting pros and cons into changeable and unchangeable, mapping out the exit plan first—didn’t give us a guaranteed perfect answer. But they took a lot of the scary, overwhelming weight off the question. Whatever she decides, it’ll work out for now.
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