DS is going to boarding school this fall and he has lived overseas his whole life. (We’ve lived all over Asia and Africa)
How many other US citizens coming from abroad go to boarding school? are they treated differently?
DS is worried that he isn’t going to fit in with the other kids.
thanks!
Not a lot, but there are some.
No.If you’re a nice kid, you’ll be treated accordingly. Ditto if you’re a jerk.
If he has common interests, he’ll find his peeps; he may have to make an effort and not assume that his peeps will find him.
Plus many boarding schools have other, native born, international kids attending. Those kids will have even more to adjust to! Besides Asian kids, there may be kids from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America etc etc.
The boarding schools I looked at seemed quite familiar with U.S. citizen kids living abroad, I got the sense that most schools have at least one if not several in every class. These include Foreign service kids, missionary kids (at religious schools), kids whose parents work at multinationals, etc.
I attended an international school overseas with many American citizen kids who had never actually lived in the United States for more than a few months each year.
When they came to the US for college, nearly all of them had a tough transition at first as they adjusted to the fact that although they felt American compared to their friends abroad, they had not had the typical American experiences growing up and were now surrounded by Americans who had.
Decades later, many of these former classmates have made happy lives for themselves in the US. But many others moved overseas after college, feeling more comfortable as Americans abroad than as Americans raised abroad living in the US. It is an interesting transition, to be sure, and one that affects kids differently.
As a foreign service kid, I found transitioning to boarding school FAR easier than transitioning to our neighborhood public school in 6th grade. In public school, my background was weird and I didn’t fit in. In boarding school, it was interesting and not that unusual. Part of that is the age difference; 6th grade vs 10th grade. But most of it was that everyone came from all over and was, or had been, the new kid.