Students at a boarding school in Guangzhou are ready for lunch. More parents are sending their children to boarding schools for convenience, lack of satisfactory public schools or plans to send the children overseas in the future. [Photo by Zou zhongpin / China Daily]

An increasing number of students are now attending boarding schools.

More than 5,000 students applied for Guangzhou Tianhe Foreign Languages School from across the province in 2012 and more than 8,000 applied for it last year, said a staff member with the recruitment office who refused to be named.

The father of a third-year junior high school girl surnamed Wang said he and his wife chose the Affiliated Tianhe School of Guangdong Experimental Middle School because their daughter would have otherwise been assigned to a poorly run junior high school. She boards during the week and returns home during the weekends.

"She is fine with boarding and got used to the environment pretty soon," he said.

All the students wear a uniform on campus, the only difference in their outfits being their shoes. No cellphones are allowed, and the students' daily spending is restricted to a limit set in their purchasing cards.

Wang gave the school thumbs up for its rather strict management of students, which requires, for example, that quilts be neatly folded and shoes properly placed, with no sodas sold on the campus.

Wang said, he hopes his daughter will become more independent by going to a boarding school.

The main reasons children are sent to boarding schools is because their parents are too busy to look after them, or the children are too naughty and the parents want the schools to provide a disciplined environment to correct their behavior, or they want their children to receive high-end education in a foreign language school or an international class, said Ge Xinbin, deputy dean of the College of Education Science of South China Normal University.

"I take business trips sometimes and my wife often takes business trips and my mother returned to her hometown, so we opted for a boarding school," said a father surnamed Zhang. His daughter goes to a public senior high school with boarding facilities during the week.

However, the girl disliked living on campus at first because of the poor food and sometimes humid environment.

"In the first semester, she always cried for having to return to school at the end of a weekend. She had the choice of traveling to school, three metro stations away, every day instead, but we want her to become independent," Zhang said. "She is fine now."

About half of the students in the school live on the campus including those from the Nansha and Conghua districts, which are much farther away.

Xie Meng, 34, a mother in Beijing's Xicheng district, plans to send her 6-year-old son to a boarding primary school this autumn, as both she and her husband are too busy with work to take care of their child.

She said she is not worried about her son, because the boy has been a boarder since he was in preschool.

"Although my son is very young, he has adapted to boarding life, and learned how to take care of himself and how to behave well at school. He is happy to enter an elementary boarding school," Xie said.

"A boarding school offers great convenience to parents," said a director with the international exchange center of Favorview Palace Primary School who only gave his family name Zhu. The school's enrollment has expanded rapidly over the past few years, and it is enrolling 48 students for the school year starting September, double the size last year. The annual fee of 73,000 yuan ($11,835) covers almost everything from tuition, accommodation and food.

However, opinion is divided on whether it is good for children to board. Critics say the cultivation of children is not only about studying, but also about their personal development and the bonds they develop with their parents.

Wang said some of his friends are against the idea of sending children to boarding schools, as they believe it lessens the bonds between parents and children.

Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at National Institute of Education Sciences, suggests that boarding is not suitable for all children, especially those under 10 years old.

"They are still too young and need more care and guidance from parents; and the love of parents can not be replaced despite many boarding school teachers making the effort to take good care of children. Many surveys show that children may have some psychological problems, such as feeling lonely and lacking confidence if they are separated from parents for a long time," Chu said.

Chu suggests that it is better to send children to boarding schools after they enter junior or senior middle school.

"Children are likely to benefit more from boarding life when they grow older, especially if the boarding school has good facilitates and is well managed," he said.