Boarding School? How Could You?

“I want to go to Harvard and afterwards be a hair cutter,” Caitlin said when she was five.

She chose Harvard, not because of huge aspirations, but because it was the closest college to our home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She was young and couldn’t foresee being far away from her family, which was just as well because I couldn’t either.  I just loved the fact she was a little girl with dreams of walking to college and making people look pretty.

During that same year, I told her she could cross the street on her own.  We had practiced looking left, right and then left again many times.  With me watching from the window, she looked left and right and left and right for about thirty seconds, making sure a car didn’t appear out of thin air on our quiet street.  She then bolted across into the neighbor’s front yard, never looking back.  She has always been circumspect and cautious, not one to travel too far outside her comfort zone.   In her crossing the street to play with her friends, I had just witnessed an important milestone.

Now she’s fifteen and still the same thoughtful girl, but along the way she’s grown up and expanded her horizons - crossing the street became walking to school and into town, sleepovers became overnight camp and independent plane travel, lemonade stands became babysitting jobs, help around the house became serving the poor in Mexico and school in town became boarding school twenty-five minutes from home.   

Standing in the line at Starbucks, I run into an acquaintance.  “I can’t imagine sending her away,” she says, looking at her curly headed five year-old with adoration and at me with slight shock and judgment.  There is a sense only bad mothers send their kids away to school.  Believe me, I was one of those slightly shocked and judgmental moms.  I remember hearing about boarding school and trying to feign a good spirited smile, but inside I was certain parental duty was being shirked.  I’d think smugly, “How could you?”

Just as children expand their own ideas of the world, so do we.  My feelings of “how could you” were the naïve thoughts of the mother of a five year-old, a mother who had only been on mother duty for five short years.  It was nearly impossible to project what my child would be like in ten years.  I could only imagine my five year-old, who just learned to cross the street, leaving home with a suitcase of clothes and a backpack full of Barbies, coloring books, pretty hairclips and craft supplies.  The five year-old version of Caitlin wasn’t ready to go any further than the neighbor’s house and I, a mother for five years, wasn’t ready to let her.    

The thing is, a decision to attend boarding school isn’t often made when a child is five.  It is an evolving thing, dependent upon a multitude of factors.  In our case it was a decision made together as a family with Caitlin’s God-given talents and aspirations taken into consideration.  Her dreams were no longer five year-old dreams of Harvard and haircutting, but the well thought out and well articulated decisions of a pre-adult.  The decision factored in prayer, a long list of pros and cons and conversation during multiple family meetings.  It was the biggest decision of her life.  It was the biggest decision we’ve made as parents and it took us a full month to make it.

Boarding school – how could we?  We looked left, right and left again and then we crossed over to the other side.   

In raising your child(ren), have you ever changed your mind about something you never thought you would?  Tell us about it!