The First Sunday Night: What Boarding School Taught Me About Helping Kids Adapt
The chapel bells rang at 7 p.m. that first night, and I remember feeling the sound right in my stomach. My parents had left an hour earlier, driving away from the red brick dormitory in a station wagon stuffed with my trunk, a small desk lamp, and a poster of a soccer team I barely followed. I stood by the window in my new room, watching the taillights disappear down the long driveway, and I thought about how incredibly quiet it was. Not quiet like a library. Quiet like being underwater.
I was thirteen. The bed was narrow and the pillow smelled faintly of industrial detergent. My roommate, a boy named Sam from Ohio, was unpacking his Walkman and cassette tapes. He asked me if I liked U2. I said yes, even though I wasn’t sure what they sounded like, because I was terrified that silence would make the loneliness worse.
That first week was a blur of misplaced belongings and awkward dining hall tables. I called home on Tuesday night, standing in line for the single payphone in the hallway, and when my mother answered I heard my voice get tight. I told her everything was fine. The food was okay. The teachers seemed strict. I didn’t tell her that I had been eating lunch alone for three days, because I didn’t have words for that kind of thing yet.
What I learned in those first few months wasn’t about algebra or French verbs. It was about how human beings adjust to a new reality. And years later, standing in my own kitchen while my daughter cried about a week-long summer camp, I realized that boarding school had actually given me a strange kind of parenting manual—one I didn’t know I had read until I needed it.
The first thing boarding school teaches you is that the emotional dip is predictable. The first night is raw, but the second week is worse. That sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. The initial adrenaline of newness fades, and then you’re just existing in a place where no one knows your middle name, your allergies, or the way you take your toast. For my daughter, the camp tears weren’t on day one or two. They came around day four, which is exactly when I remembered feeling the walls close in at school. I had a conversation with her counselor, not about her crying, but about her routine. I asked if she was sleeping. I asked if she was eating breakfast. Those small biological anchors matter more than pep talks during that dip.
At boarding school, I had a teacher named Mr. Delaney who taught history. He wasn’t warm, but he was consistent. He asked the same question every morning to each student as we walked into class: “What’s one thing you’re thinking about today?” That took maybe twenty seconds. It wasn’t therapy. He wasn’t digging for feelings. He just wanted a sentence. I remember telling him once, “I’m thinking about the sausages at breakfast,” and he wrote it down on a clipboard. The next day, he asked again.
What I understand now is that Mr. Delaney was giving us a low-stakes way to be seen. The question didn’t demand vulnerability. It allowed for nonsense. And sometimes you start with nonsense, and then by Thursday you actually tell him you’re worried about your father’s health back home. When my daughter came back from that camp, I tried to do something similar over dinner. I didn’t ask how she felt. I asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you ate or saw all week?” That got me three full minutes of talking, which was more than I had gotten out of her in a month.
One of the hardest adjustments for parents to understand is that their child will not want to talk about the thing that is hard. At boarding school, I would call home and give my parents nothing. “Fine,” I’d say. “It’s fine.” I could hear my mother’s worry through the receiver, but I couldn’t give her more. It was too big. The physical act of being there, in that room, without my own bed, was so enormous that I couldn’t shape it into conversation.
What helped wasn’t asking for details. It was having tangible things from home. My mother sent a small package with a cassette tape of music she liked, some beef jerky, and a photograph of our dog. That package was a concrete object, not a conversation. It didn’t require me to articulate anything. When my daughter started struggling at camp, I resisted the urge to call and demand emotional reports. Instead, I sent one letter in the mail before she left—a waterproof envelope with my handwriting and a few dollar bills for the camp store. The money wasn’t the point. The envelope was a physical thing she could hold that said “parent” without needing phone time.
Here is something that surprised me about boarding school: the homesickness wasn’t constant. It came in waves, and the waves eventually started taking longer to arrive. By November, I could walk past the dormitory phone without my chest feeling tight. I had a rhythm. I knew where to sit in the dining hall. I had learned which mornings the cafeteria served the decent cereal. The place had become ordinary, and there is a kind of relief in ordinariness that kids don’t have words for but feel deeply.
Teachers and parents can help this along, but not by cheerleading. There’s a pressure in adult reactions to make kids feel grateful for their opportunities. “You’re so lucky to be here!” is a sentence that lands badly when you’re lonely. What I remember appreciating more was the adults who made small, unspoken accommodations. The cafeteria lady who slid me an extra roll without comment. The roommate who noticed I was quiet and just sat on his bed doing his homework without asking me what was wrong. That’s the model I try to use now with my own kids. I don’t have to solve the discomfort. I just have to stand in the same room and rearrange furniture—having dinner be a little later, leaving a light on in the hallway, sending a text with a picture of the cat and no follow-up questions.
The other thing I learned was about the power of a scheduled anchor. At boarding school, my anchor was something embarrassingly simple: the Sunday afternoon snack run to the gas station down the road. We walked the same route. We bought the same sour candy. That half hour of predictable movement kept the whole week from collapsing into an abstract cloud of time. Years later, when I dropped my daughter off for her first overnight school trip, I suggested she find one small thing to do at the same time every day. She chose calling me at 8:15 a.m. from the breakfast line. It was short. It was concrete. She didn’t have to decide anything, which was the point.
There is a version of this article that ends with a neat conclusion about how boarding school built my character and made me resilient. I don’t want to tell you that. The truth is more complicated. I did become familiar with that place, but I wouldn’t say I ever fully loved it. I learned how to get by. I learned that adults are sometimes just people who are tired. I learned that homesickness and belonging can exist in the same body at the same time.
And now, watching my daughter navigate her own separations—her first camp, her first extended stay away from our house—I don’t have a grand philosophy to pass down. I just have a few small things I know work: keep the routine boring, give them a physical object to hold, don’t ask for emotional reports, and let the quiet settle before you fill it with your own worry.
She goes to a sleepaway camp again this summer. She says she’s excited. She also asks for the same brand of granola bars she liked last year, and I know she’s not really asking about breakfast. She’s checking that the world will look familiar when she returns.
I’m not sure she’ll have a Mr. Delaney this time. I’m not sure she’ll find her gas station run. But I’m learning to be okay with the not knowing. The dormitory phone calls taught me that. Some things just take time to become ordinary again.
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