How do you know whether your child could benefit from boarding school?

At my kids’ K-8 independent school located in New England, boarding school is one of the many options presented for secondary school, along with public, parochial, and private day schools. Although my DS didn’t initiate the consideration of BS, in looking through the local options, it pretty quickly became clear that none of the day schools (or BSs) within a reasonable commute provided what he needed, so we included BSs.

The practical issues that @springfield18 mentioned were a big consideration for us. Adding 60-90 minutes of commuting time every day to the heavier HS sports/EC schedule + the added rigor of HS would not have been workable; BS provided more and better structure than we had at home, where every day was a frenzy.

For families living within a few hours (2 to 3 hours) drive of the boarding school, the change from day to boarding is a less troubling decision for both the students & the parents. Although this seems obvious, I can confirm this after meeting dozens of families in both situations.

My kid wanted to go because of being tired of spending hours in the car, here most kids do sports every season and you often have your club practice after school one as well. So we spend a ton of time in the car, the school does not have fields so they drive half hour to practice even just for school sports. Club sport practices and games are close to an hour away on a good day, with tri-state area traffic it can be a lot more. Plus the high school sports are not very good at the privates in the city, so you still have to go full steam ahead on club if you want to get any better. So it was boarding school or moving to the burbs for us.

We were the 2-hour boarding school radius family, which seems to be common for NYC people, and certainly plan to make it to the games or other campus events at least once a week. And it seems like a lot of BS kids come home fairly frequently on weekends, too. Even from schools farther away, just talked to someone with a kid at Andover who comes home every other weekend. If mine wants to do that I would not be at all opposed, though if not that will be fine as well.

Depends on the family and the kid. Some parents first begin to suggest BS as an option which can benefit the child’s education, or they are a BS family. Some kids want to go to a BS for a myriad of reasons. However you come to it as a family/student doesn’t matter as much as both sides making the final decision.
My own kid didn’t even want to look at BS ( we are not a BS family). Now that kid cannot imagine option B ( which was an excellent option). It took some time to explore what the various BS offered and also consider what the local public school offered.