Everything You Want To Know About Life At Boarding School

Do you want to read what most people will write or do you want to know the truth? If you want to know the truth about life at boarding school, you have come to the right place. Sit back, relax, and inform yourself. However, by the end of this article, it’s more likely that you will be leaning forward, your eyes will be glued to the page, and your mind will be doing its best to digest everything you just read.

As you might have guessed, there are pros and cons to life at boarding school. We’ll begin with the pros.

Pros For Boarding School

It’s possible that boarding school will be a good fit for you. That’s even the case when you include the cons. It really depends what you want out of life. More on that soon.

The biggest pros for going to boarding school are making new friends, becoming more independent, and getting college-like experience. More specific pros include learning punctuality, discipline, responsibility, increased self-confidence, and improved money-management skills.

Boarding school is all about developing habits for life, and boarding school is highly effective in this regard. For instance, you’re going to make your bed every morning, clean dishes, prepare your uniform, clean the campus, and more. These might sound like cons, but they’re actually pros because they’re preparing your for life whereas most teenagers are at home playing video games and complaining when they’re asked to take the garbage out. Which habits do you think are going to lead to better results in the future?

At boarding school, you will be rewarded for your hard work in different ways. One is by developing camaraderie with other students, who will become your friends. Another is by becoming close with some of the teachers, coaches, tutors, office staff, maintenance staff, and especially your dorm parents. A third way you will be rewarded is with off-campus activities, including movies, hiking, bowling, etc.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that boarding school makes a lot of sense. That might be the case for you, but there is one major negative about life at boarding school.

The Big Con For Boarding School

Sticking with the blunt and right-to-the-point style of this page, when you’re dropped off at boarding school as a teenager, you’re going to feel abandoned. Many times, the teenager being dropped off by their parent(s) will cry privately (sometimes publicly). Even with the rebellious nature teenagers have, they still need affection. In fact, they need it more than most age groups. This is a vulnerable age and they just want to be understood.

Here’s the twist. According to many psychologists, those same teenagers who cried when they were dropped off at boarding school haven’t cried a day in their life since as adults. If they have cried, these instances have been few and far between. When they felt abandoned at that young age, their natural psychological reaction was emotional self-preservation, which led to what you could call Emotional Steel. Back at that time, when they needed support, they would usually go to their dorm parents. That likely helped, but the dorm parents are still strangers that form relationships with many students. There is no natural ‘This is my child’ kind of relationship.

Good Or Bad?

This isn’t an easy world. Therefore, perhaps you want to be armed with Emotional Steel. You will never have your heart broken (not like others), and not much will faze you. You will be incredibly resilient and fear almost nothing—not even the prospect of living in a box in an alley. You will likely be an overachiever as well. On the other hand, you will not experience true love like others because you won’t let anyone in.

Which one do you want to be? Here’s a surprise for you. I possess emotional steel due to abandonment. And since I’m always honest … I like it.