My DH is sent away to boarding school aged 11. He boarded until age 18. Went home for the 2 main holidays, stayed at school over weekends and half terms.
Living with him, and raising our DC together, I can honestly say he is a very odd man.
He permanently talks to our DS about tales of his boarding school days. I feel sorry for DS having to spend years on end subjected to DH regaling tales from boarding school. It's like he's emotionally still there. He formed his attachment - during his years of huge brain development - to his boarding school, his co-boarders, and the teachers there. He talks endlessly of these boarding school years, but it's in an odd, overly attached way, not in a way that's nice to listen to. He literally never talks about his parents or sibling. He has no emotional attachment to them at all. All we hear about is boarding school teachers and students. But he is overly obsessive about it all. It's odd. He even goes back to the school to look around the grounds, like a ghost 30 years later. But ask him anything about his family life during his teenage years and there's nothing there, no memories, nothing to recollect, no emotional attachment whatsoever. If he ever does speak of his parents or sibling, he talks about them in the way I would talk about acquaintences.
He is emotionally immature. A man in his late 40s with the emotional maturity of a 14 year old boy; he never developed in to the maturityof a man, he still lives off the same jokes he was making at boarding school with the other teenage boarders. He is emotionally very detached from me and DC. There is a gulf between us in terms of parenting skills - he actually doesn't know how to parent our young teenagers. He is overwhelmingly insecure in himself and this leads to all sorts of problems in his adult life. He doesn't know how to be an adult. Nobody showed him. Sure, his school educated him in maths, history, science, etc. But he never saw his parents so they were never available to teach him life skills. He severely lacks l8fe skills, to the point of it being a significant disadvantage as an adult. He's lost as an adult. Can't manage money, can't manage paying bills, can't organise himself, no DIY skills, can't maintain our home, can't parent, there are so many life skills he simply doesn't have, through never being parented aged 11 to 18. But throw him a random question about the Roman empire or ask him to recite a line from one of the great classics and he can answer you, because of the academic education he was given.
However, an excellent private education has not seen him in to a high paying career in his adulthood, because his intense emotional insecurity, his lifelong anxiety, his lack of resilience and his severe lack of life skills has halted his adult development because he can't actually cope with the demands of a high end career. So he's got brilliant academic qualifications thanks to his boarding school but is in a very average paying low demand job because of his emotional damage.
He has ended up a man-child stuck inside the emotional development of a 14 year old fixated on a school that is, 30 years later, filled with strangers now.
It is very unnerving indeed, and I blame all of it on him being packed off to boarding school far from home as an 11 year old child.
Meanwhile, our 2 DC are at the local state school 10 minutes down the road and as young teenagers they have more self respect, self security, self confidence and life skills than DH has as an adult. DC are glowing with happiness through non stop daily parenting and input from me.
Sadly, DH looked at them recently and quietly told me he never felt loved and wanted as a child in the way that our DC do, all because he was sent away.