3 Surprising Benefits Of Boarding High School For Our Son With ADHD and School Anxiety
This post was written by a guest blogger who is the parent of a current student at The Leelanau School. Their hope is that writing about their own family’s experiences will help others find a best fit school for their children too.
“The right boarding school can be more than a path to ‘finish high school’ and ‘get into a good college’ or any college at all for
Leelanau Parent, class of 2019that matter . It can be a truly transformative experience that enhances a child’s well-being and future success far beyond dealing with the immediate issues that often drive parents to consider an alternative school.”
Finding The Best Path
Raising three sons presents challenges in any circumstance. Besides the typical issues, my wife and I found ourselves coping with our middle son’s developmental issues. They began to emerge in preschool, but became more profound in Kindergarten. Our son is a charming, creative, funny, and highly-intelligent boy. However, he was also diagnosed with ADHD. Thus, we began our years long process of trying to help him find a path through school and social settings.
We live in an area populated with many affluent families, which allowed us to pursue a range of therapies and treatments over the years. Our school district is relatively well resourced and provided a robust Individualized Education Plan (IEP) which included various accommodations for learning differences (more time for tests, priority in desk placement, allowing him greater flexibility to get up and move during class). Remarkable to us at the time, he received a dedicated or shared in-class aide to help discretely guide our son along and help him stay on track in school.
Despite marshaling whatever we could to help our son, our son’s own intelligence, good nature, and eagerness to achieve, we faced a growing crisis in junior high. Academic success was increasingly difficult for him. The accommodations and therapies that had helped him develop through grammar school were increasingly seen by him as a burden and a mark of failure. His self-esteem suffered and he grew increasingly despondent. He had developed ”school induced anxiety” and it became increasingly difficult for him to focus on even routine tasks and assignments. Eighth grade, particularly towards the latter quarters, became an excruciating chase to find and submit numerous misplaced and/or misunderstood assignments so that he could graduate and move on to high school.
By this point, we had identified a gem of a private high school: The Leelanau School. So, our anxiety about 8th grade was balanced by the hope that our son could be free of the structures of even a well-resourced and well-intentioned public-school system. When he eventually reached senior year at The Leelanau School, his experience totally exceeded our initial expectations for what he could gain from an alternative learning environment. Not only was he able to excel academically and socially, he also gained some profound life skills and, for lack of a better word, wisdom that most people don’t come to until much later in life, if at all.
The three surprising benefits of boarding high school for our son with ADHD and school anxiety:
1) Greater independence and maturity
My wife and I had never considered boarding school for any of our sons. We hadn’t even seriously considered private schools. The local public schools are highly ranked and well resourced. So, it was a big readjustment for us to think about sending our fourteen-year-old to boarding school. One thing that made it easier was the schedule has more breaks than we expected based on our college experience, with him usually returning home roughly every four to six weeks for a nine-day break. So, it was not as big of an adjustment as we originally expected.
An unexpected upside of boarding school is that our son has developed a level of independence and maturity in dealing with social situations that I feel is far beyond those of his peers who attended the local schools. He is comfortable taking on leadership roles, working well with both his fellow students and teachers and has greater social awareness and presence when dealing with others.
2) Finding his passion
Finding a passion in life has often been cited as a key to a happy and meaningful life. So, naturally, we’d like for our son to find things in life that really drive him. But this was furthest from our mind when we made the decision to send him to boarding school. We were merely trying to help him “survive” high school and hopefully be in a good position to go onto college.
The learning setting, access to caring and inspiring teachers, and accommodative learning styles allowed our son to explore different skills and interests and land on creative writing as a real drive and passion.
3) Appreciation for his own skills and qualities
One of the hurdles of growing up as a kid who doesn’t fit the usual patterns is that his gifts get buried under layers of self-doubt from trying to meet the expectations of an increasingly demanding “academic career path.” Being able to step back from the seemingly relentless march towards a narrow set of defined outcomes of the local high school allowed our son to observe where he excels and what he enjoys. As a result, he’s developed confidence around skills and qualities, including his ability to reach-out and connect with all types of people, his sense of humor, and his creativity, that would likely have eluded him for years, maybe forever.
Our motivations for finding an alternate school for our son were profound and basic – wanting to see him graduate from high school and be ready to move onto college. We hoped that he could avoid being crushed by the pressure to conform to social expectations that didn’t fit him. In the end, however, he gained much more than just avoiding a bad situation. He was able to grow in ways and gain wisdom that can otherwise take years to achieve.