What’s something you do completely differently from how you were raised?
I didn’t send my children away to boarding school
I was sent to away to an all-male boarding school at age eight. Whatever its virtues — and there were some — I know what it is to be a child whose life is organised around leaving home, returning to school, counting the weeks to the holidays, not seeing your parents for months, and learning very young to get on with it.
So I did the opposite.
I wanted to be there. Not simply for the significant occasions, but for the ordinary stuff: school runs, baths, bedtime, days out, learning to swim, exploring woods or the seashore, sitting around, fixing things, listening, guinea-pigs everywhere, being available. Their birthdays were an event! Lots of friends, a big theme, parrty games and prizes, a bouncy Castle and cake!
For a while I worked from home and became, as I called myself, “Mrs Daddy”.
My parents’ generation believed that sending a child away to boarding school made them independent. Perhaps it did. Or they just wanted to enjoy their adult lives ‘unencumbered’ by child care, which they delegated to others and could afford to do. It was cruel. There’s enough proof of that in the bluntness of the school reports they wrote. Some were not qualified teachers. There was no pastoral care. We lost our identity to a number and our surname. Or a nickname.
It makes a boarding prep school sound like a correctional facility rather than a school for 8-13-year-olds (some even start at age 7). I was taunted for having a ‘shit mark’ – a pigmented birthmark conveniently well hidden under my left armpit – until I raised my arms to conduct a monitored dive into the school pool. A child’s strengths, unless they involved the prescribed lessons and activities, were diminished or not permitted. It was a classic case of aiming to bash whatever shape the man-child came in into a specific whole.
But I came to believe there was another way to raise an independent adult: give a child the security of knowing that home and parents were there for them.
So that is the thing I did completely differently from how I was raised.
I kept my children close.
They chose to leave when they went off to university.
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