Troubled Teens Resources

Teen crisis intervention is often simply continuous self-education and an awareness of all the factors creating your teen’s world view. It is devoting time to understanding the behavioral dynamics at play in your home.

It is thoroughly examining your schools curriculum. It is examining different teaching philosophies and the pop psychology that often propels some of these progressive teaching policies currently in play across academia. These are more and more programs that produce rather stunted educational objectives and actually amount to an inappropriate tendency for today’s public school teachers to act more in the capacity of social engineers than teachers of math, literature and the sciences.

Along those lines, a book worth reading is The Dangerous Book for Boys . The author makes a compelling case in describing how some of these social engineering theories are wrecking havoc with young boys in America.

“… I am [a father] myself and I think we’ve become aware that the whole “health and safety” overprotective culture isn’t doing our sons any favors. Boys need to learn about risk. They need to fall off things occasionally, or–and this is the important bit–they’ll take worse risks on their own. If we do away with challenging playgrounds and cancel school trips for fear of being sued, we don’t end up with safer boys–we end up with them walking on train tracks. In the long run, it’s not safe at all to keep our boys in the house with a Playstation. It’s not good for their health or their safety.

You only have to push a boy on a swing to see how much enjoys the thrill of danger. It’s hard-wired. Remove any opportunity to test his courage and they’ll find ways to test themselves that will be seriously dangerous for everyone around them. I think of it like playing the lottery–someone has to say “Look, you won’t win–and your children won’t be hurt. Relax. It won’t be you.”

I think that’s the core of the book’s success. It isn’t just a collection of things to do. The heroic stories alone are something we haven’t had for too long. It isn’t about climbing Everest, but it is an attitude, a philosophy for fathers and sons. Our institutions are too wrapped up in terror over being sued–so we have to do things with them ourselves. This book isn’t a bad place to start.”