Parent life / A first year at boarding school, fall to spring
An Only Child Went to Boarding School to Get Some Distance
In a 2025 essay for The Hotchkiss Record, a student explained how she dodged her parents' calls with invented tests, and what happened when she got sick that winter.
In October 2025 a Hotchkiss student wrote an essay for the school paper, The Hotchkiss Record, titled "An Only Child Goes to Boarding School." In Lower Manhattan her school had been across the street from her building. Her parents drove her to golf. Her mother had been her only violin teacher. At 14, she wrote, it felt unfair to be the emotional center of someone's universe.
So she applied to boarding school in Connecticut, offering every reason except the real one: golf recruiting, an overcrowded school, being stuck in Spanish instead of French. Her mother let her apply. When the acceptance came, her mother's face showed sadness, and she later admitted she had half hoped the school would be the bad guy and say no.
The first months, the student wrote, were not the escape she expected. There were constant texts, FaceTime calls and visits. She ignored calls, left texts unanswered, and "fabricated tests and assignments to keep them from showing up."
Every parent who has sent a text into silence should know: the silence is being managed, with great effort, by someone who will call when it matters.
Then winter. She got sick, repeatedly, and spent more time in the Health Center than in class. The first face she thought of was her mother's. She felt like a hypocrite calling. Her mother, as if she'd forgotten the past few months, "immediately went into super-mom mode, rattling off a list of things I needed."
Distance changed both of them. Her mother had given up performing violin when her daughter was born, to teach on a predictable schedule. Now she was playing solo and in orchestras again. The daughter found she liked her parents' visits, especially when the laundry hamper was overflowing and they could take a load home.
I read this twice. The second time I read it as the parent, which I am, and I lingered on the violin.
The eldest is a junior. She has not gone away. She is just upstairs, which can be farther. Last month she had a bad cold and stayed in bed for two days with the door shut. On the second evening my phone buzzed. It was a text from upstairs: "do we have the good tea."
We did. I took it up. She let me sit on the end of the bed for nine minutes. I am not complaining about the nine minutes.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- The Hotchkiss Record: An Only Child Goes to Boarding School hotchkissrecord.org
- Whitgift boarding: A guide to help parents cope with homesickness boarding.org.uk
- Our Kids: How to prepare for the move to boarding school ourkids.net
- Phillips Academy: FAQs for Students and Families andover.edu