Agency, Not Attendance: Involuntary Boarding School Enrolment, Adult Separation Anxiety and Parenting Attitudes—A Cross-Sectional Study from Türkiye

Objective: This study examines associations between adolescent boarding-school experiences and adult separation anxiety and parenting attitudes. Bridging sociological and psychiatric perspectives, we examined whether adult separation anxiety statistically accounts for the association between boarding-school experiences and parenting attitudes, and whether psychological resilience moderates this pathway. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey recruited 173 adults, including 117 participants with a boarding-school history recruited via snowball sampling across 42 institutions to maximize institutional heterogeneity and 56 participants in a non-boarding comparison group. Parenting attitudes were assessed exclusively in participants with children (n = 132). Analyses included covariate-adjusted ANCOVAs, hierarchical regressions, and bootstrap-based simple mediation (jAMM) to evaluate indirect pathways. Results: Boarding-school attendance alone did not determine maladaptive outcomes. Among participants with complete mediation-model data (n = 86), not being consulted about boarding attendance was associated with higher adult separation anxiety (β = 0.289, p = 0.005), and separation anxiety was associated with more protective parenting (β = 0.229, p = 0.035); the estimated indirect association was small (β = 0.066) and not robust across bootstrap procedures. The hypothesised moderating role of resilience was tested and not supported (a-path p = 0.990, b-path p = 0.345). In exploratory bivariate analyses, longer boarding duration was modestly associated with more over-tolerant parenting (r = 0.22, q = 0.047 after false-discovery-rate correction). In hierarchical regressions, boarding-school level accounted for additional variance in protective, authoritarian and over-tolerant parenting (ΔR2 = 0.07–0.11, all p ≤ 0.006) but not in democratic parenting, which was predicted instead by the Perception-of-Self dimension of resilience (β = 0.46, p < 0.001). Higher educational attainment was likewise associated with more democratic parenting in covariate-adjusted comparisons (F(1, 128) = 8.91, p = 0.003, η2p = 0.065). Conclusions: Perceived participation in boarding-school decisions and features of boarding exposure may be relevant to adult separation anxiety and parenting attitudes. These associations require testing in prospective, probability-sampled designs.