#this is. you can't take conclusions from uniquely abusive boarding school situations and extrapolate that

[scintillyyy]

okay i'm gonna do it. i'm gonna talk about boarding school syndrome.

alright so obviously the reason this has come to my attention is because i'm more frequently seeing the concept in association with tim, so of course i wanted to do my own look into it to see if i agreed. because tbh everything i was seeing about boarding school syndrome as a concept felt very similar to a lot of things you see in parenting science stuff--where new theories are presented as science based absolute fact despite the fact that the actual evidence therein leaves a bit to be desired and the research isn't actually super robust & does a bit of twisting of other research to suit their needs & has not really shown it's replicable outside of the people who are pushing their theory in particular.

and this is not to say that boarding school doesn't exist or boarding school doesn't cause harm to kids at all, those things can be very true. but i also would like to point out how and why you should be looking at sweeping claims of it critically, even if you do agree with the theory and the findings themselves.

so, my first quick purview into boarding school syndrome shows that most of what you immediately get about it upon looking it up is from therapy clinics themselves about all the negative things that boarding school definitely causes. which, isn't inherently bad, but you should always keep in mind that whenever it's a website for a clinic--they're very much trying to sell you the need for their services & you should always take into account that bias. one of the clinics did have a list of references for boarding school syndrome, so i decided to check these out.

one is a link to john bowlby's initial theory of attachment and the idea that separation itself is traumatic for kids. however this is where we start to see some twisting of exisiting research to suit one's needs--bowlby himself was focused on wartime orphans and traumatic separation as a result which people nowadays do like to extrapolate his findings into any sort of separation, even nontraumatic, for funsies.

one of the sources was a link to the website of the woman who coined boarding school syndrome, not actual research

one of the sources for the evils of boarding school was a random blog post

one was a general paper on dissociation but nothing to do with boarding school in particular causing it

one was a news article from a man who is also a big name in the concept and who also happens to have had a traumatic boarding school experience himself

one appears to be a book or opinion article from, again, the woman who coined boarding school syndrome as a thing

i can't say i'm super impressed thus far, as there's a lot of pretty serious and sweeping claims being made and no signficant robust evidence across several nonbiased sources to back them up. frankly, it kind of reminds me of the packets you get in baby friendly hospitals that say if you feed your kids formula they'll be fat, get depression, get cancer, and kill themselves. if you're going to make sweeping assertions of this magnitude, you gotta be able to back it up with good evidence.

anyways, this brings me to the main players in the idea of boarding school syndrome. the one who coined it, joy schaverien, and nick duffell. schaverien appears to have conceived the theory due to seeing what she felt was a strong correlation in her specific patient population having gone to boarding school with having issues as an adult and began to attribute said difficulties to boarding school. nick duffell wrote a book about it, his evidence was his own traumatic experiences and traumatic experiences of famous people who attended boarding school. and not that those experiences aren't important or valid or awful, they very much were. the limitation lies in whether you can extrapolate those specific experiences of abusive boarding into whether or not nonabusive boarding school in general is in and of itself harmful as a concept. and, well. obviously hearing from these sources about harms is good and important, but we do have to keep in mind that they are human and have biases. they also derive a lot of their anecdotal evidence from explicitly abusive boarding situations back in the past and then appear to attribute the issues that result from the attending boarding school portion vs the abuse portion and then apply it to current boarding school as evil as a whole. they are making a suggestion that boarding separation is traumatic, no able to definitively say it is traumatic. anyways. i'm just saying, these two are going to want to prove themselves right. just like the wonder weeks guy. and hey, they can be biased and correct. that's always a possibility. in that case, we would be able to see significant replicable findings in similar research, that boarding school is bad for all kids. so can we?

well. i'll be honest. from my cursory perusing, as a whole research into boarding school is limited, and the studies themselves are largely weak--be it sample size, failure to account for confounding variables, tending to be survey based which will likely give you a biased sample pool to begin with. but still, evidence can be evidence. so does the evidence largely show that boarding school is evil and kids suffer just going to it and it will cause kids to have all sorts of terrible issues into adulthood? it's decidedly.....mixed. some studies show some signficant increases in things like depression, anxiety, substance abuse disorders. others show that there's really not a whole lot of difference between boarders and nonboarders when it comes to attachment, others show minimal difference in emotional issues, some studies even indicate boarders report getting along with their parents better than nonboarders or at the very least, no significant differences between boarders and non boarders in their relationships with peers or adults, or boarding school potentially having better outcomes in comparison to unstable home situations. but these studies have limitations of their own--tending to research just older children vs younger children, where studies have shown that younger children may have slightly worse effects going earlier or being limited to one specific type of boarding school situation that may not be able to truly capture what a totally different boarding environment would be like. there's also limitations in whether or not some of the issues of boarding nowadays (such as not being able to contact parents or feeling like you can't leave the situation/you're stuck there) are truly as significant when compared to nonboarders with today's technology (easy ability to contact parents at any time, nonboarders also being followed home with bad school situations due to social media/unable to disconnect). the research is limited there.

so, what is boils down to--listen i do think that boarding school definitely has negatives & can be harmful. whether or not we can expect a nonabusive (or fictional, and therefore most likely nonabusive) boarding schools to cause as many or as signficant of those kinds of issues is genuinely up in the air and not settled by any means & the sweeping assertations of boarding school syndrome and it's purported ill effects aren't necessarily super backed up by evidence at this time, a lot of it is conjecture and hypotheses. doesn't mean it's untrue, but it's also attributing to boarding schools things that very well could have been caused by other negative abusive practices, or physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. the correlation is there, but you can't significantly attribute causation when there are other significant confounding factors. we really haven't been able to answer that in the absence of those things if boarding school will really ruin your attachment forever and give you psychological problems as compared to regular schooling.

because idk. as i was perusing through this topic, i found there were several assertions that i felt had a lot of unanswered questions as far as possible causation:

claims as far as sending your children away to boarding school ruins attachment: how do we know this? do we know that these kids were previously securely attachment and their attachment style changed upon being sent to boarding school? you can't know unless you somehow manage to measure attachment before and after to show that it truly damages it. you'd also have to account for other possible factors--was their bullying or some form of abuse. can you prove it was the school itself vs the harms there. can you compare this to a non abusive boarding school environment and see if attachment still gets altered as a result. is the change in attachment different from traditional schooling if abuses occur there as well?

speaking of attachment, is there at all a correlation of nonsecurity prior to attendance--are non secure adult parents more likely to send their non secure children to boarding school than secure ones? is there at all a difference in child outcome based on whether they are prior securely attached children or not. you can't know that a child was securely attached based only on if they liked their parents or not--and also, the relationship souring as a result doesn't necessarily mean that attachment has changes. does previous security provide a protective effect against possible harms from parental separation. does nonsecurity even before attendance at school contribute to the negative outcomes from the separation at all.

idk. i feel like there's definite evidenence of negatives but also, as with parenting science in general the evidence is not so wholly negative it becomes a situation where there is a definitive right or wrong answer. as with all things there are pros and cons that must be weighed for individual situations.