Troubled Teens Resources

One very effective means of teen crisis intervention is peer pressure. Yes, the same peer pressure that may convince a teenager to try drugs can also convince them not to. Teens have an opportunity to apply some of that type of pressure by presiding over the sentencing of their fellow teens in teen court.

Teen courts exist all over the nation. in one variation or another. and are surprisingly effective in dealing out justice that seems to leave a lasting impression. Teen help in the form of positive peer culture is employed on a far more comprehensive level in behavioral programs in many teen boarding schools.

“The court sees between 25 and 35 defendants each year, Rutten said.

The program has shown it works, Rutten said.

Only about 3 percent of the teens who have completed the court program end up back in the Clallam County juvenile justice system…”

What the teens say, goes. Thus one teen was told to go fishing and catch “dinner” for a week for a disabled person unable to do so. One of the objectives of the program is to help an offender to develop a connection with the community, theory being that teens do not cause harm to a neighborhood that they feel a part of.

“While Rutten and DuBeau observe the court, they do not intervene as the teens hear arguments and pass sentences.

“Kids are doing sentencing; they understand the motivation of why kids did something. They understand kids’ thoughts and action.”
[…]
Teenagers volunteering for the court said they like being in charge, and they take it seriously.”
(source)

A proponent of marijuana legalization suggests that your children become inflamed drug users the minute that they find out that pot is not likely to kill them. If only we told the truth in DARE and encouraged the children to understand that alcohol and ecstasy and pot are just fine, because, gee, they aren’t as dangerous as heroin or coke.

That is the “logic” that encourages teen age drug abuse and it is the slippery slope that the Netherlands and other countries employed when decriminalizing drugs. Now addicts casually leave government supplied needles laying about in public parks and cost the taxpayers incredible sums of money as their dollars go to their supposed rehab by methadone and other drugs.

Read it and weep. But don’t be surprised if you find teachers in your kid’s schools who agree with it. Which is another reason parents are home schooling or seeking out private teen boarding schools, but I digress….

“Too many people are addicted to drugs like meth and Prozac and alcohol, too many people misunderstand the effects of fun drugs like cannabis and alcohol and ecstasy, and not enough people are teaching new generations how to tell the difference.

The education system is also wonderfully situated to provide hands-on training in a safe environment. Why not serve some red wine with cafeteria lunches? Red wine has many valuable nutrients, and if there’s one thing that third graders need after a morning of arithmetic and spelling, it’s a stiff drink.

Once the students hit adolescence, they should be provided with a small psychoactive drug starter kit, containing samples of the least dangerous drugs, plus a little handbook listing the unsafe dosages, by body weight, of popular recreational drugs.”

(source)

If parents with young children want to know ahead of time how to raise them safe from drugs and strong enough to resist peer pressure, they might start with examining their own values - or lack of them. If parents want their kids in good boarding schools and not names on the rosters of boarding schools for troubled teens, they’d best provide them with the ammunition that they need and there isn’t a more dependable defense against teen drug abuse than a belief system built on strong principles.

“Having a clearly defined Belief System for your home helps everyone know how to act, where the “line” is so they know when they step over it, and what consequences to expect. Teenagers can learn from established rules and consequences, but generally get frustrated from rules and consequences that seem arbitrary or inconsistent.

Why is this so important? Because teens are prone to test their parents in every possible way. It is part of their built-in and growing need for independence, and they need to exercise their own free will. This is why parents need to take time to establish a clearly defined Belief System before their children enter the adolescent years. Doing so will go a long way toward avoiding parenting chaos and helping your teen eventually establish similar beliefs for himself.”

(source)

Boarding schools for teenagers may not be the best solution for any number of reasons. Admittedly, teen boarding schools, be they for troubled teens or specialty schools for the gifted, are a luxury that many parents find that they can not afford. But in many cases parents very much want their kids to experience a complete family life. They want them at the kitchen table doing homework, they want them in the back yard throwing a football. They want the traditional American family life.

But by the same token, most parents are alarmed by the education that their teens are receiving in public schools.

“There are those who seem to think that there is simply no hope for a child who goes to a public school. This is far from true. While private school and home schooling can be excellent options for those to whom they are available, one need not view public school as a choice of last resort.”

Of course, it requires a parent to be pro-active in their teens life. You can’t send them out the door and hope for the best.

“If you as the parent are not getting involved with the education process, the chances of your child’s success in public school drastically diminish.

Education begins in the home, and your child’s success will have a lot to do with the groundwork laid before the child even walks into kindergarten that first day. Moreover, education must continue to be reinforced in the home throughout your child’s schooling…. ”

(source)
(Photo: Kate Geraghty)

Click the link above to see how you can work with your teenagers.

Schools for troubled teens do not give their students the luxury of free time. Teenagers with addictions and behavioral problems are given priveleges based on performance and behavior. One privilege treated like gold in many teen boarding schools is access to the internet. Unlike many naive or indifferent parents, staff is well aware of the inappropriate and harmful information teens can dig up on the net.

If your teen has unrestricted access to the computer in your home, you would do well to monitor their use. Just find some teen chat rooms or go on MySpace and you’ll get an idea why the internet is not the best place for teens at risk to spend their time.

“A new study from the Caron Treatment Centers analyzed more than 10 million online messages written by teens and found a number of conversations about drinking, taking drugs, and having sex. The study was based on a computerized search of blogs, public chat rooms, message boards, and other Internet sites. Research firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics said that about 2 percent of posts specifically mentioned alcohol or other drugs.

Common discussions included trading information about using drugs without getting hurt or caught and debates about legalization and the drinking age. Some teens discussed their partying and sexual activities. Often, newer slang for drugs was used to avoid raising red flags among suspicious parents.

Bad information on drugs abounds online. Some teens have found themselves in the Emergency Room after following misinformation regarding supposed safe drug combinations. There is no way for teens to differentiate good vs bad information.”

(source)

Guess I’m stuck on the meth meme today. There certainly are some compelling stories of how absolutely corrosive and vile this addiction is. One young man, when describing the destruction meth wrought in his life, said something that caught my attention.

“The meth gets you thinking three things. You have a fear of life, fear of success, and fear of self. When this happened I seemed to not have the will to go or ask for help. ”

(Source)

Just as that is the exact formula for a life of failure, it’s opposite is a good description of how schools for troubled teens and military boarding schools turn the addict around.

A good teen boarding school will have teachers and programs that teach teens to embrace life, not fear it. A good teen program will teach a troubled teenager the incremental steps of achieving success - the discipline, the perseverance - all of those little mental muscles that a recovering teen has to ‘work out’ until they are fit and toned.

Fear of self is also part and parcel of addiction. When your life is collapsed around you, friends gone, money depleted, health deteriorating, an addict grows to have a deep distrust of themselves. Unworthiness shrouds the self-image in a veil of self-recrimination and hate.

Fear of self can, however, be transformed into confidence in self. The troubled teen school dedicates much of their curriculum to helping a teen gain mastery over their talents, teaching them skills that the teen can leverage to pursue any goal that they finally decide on.

Teens at risk that come from a home where one, or both, parents suffer depression are vulnerable to more stress and, not too surprisingly, weight gain.

A couple of factors play into this and, divorcing this information from the psychological jargon, it just is common sense. A parent fighting depression is often too fatigued and stretched so thin that they haven’t the will or reserves to see to it their child or teen are eating right or exercising. Depression exacerbates their ability to be sensitive to the needs of others, so it is not unexpected for parental depression to have a negative impact on the entire family.

“Children whose parents were struggling or who reported more problems with peers tended to have a lower overall score for quality of life. Both bullying and parent distress were linked to more depressive symptoms in children, and these symptoms seemed to be related to poorer quality of life.

“One of the pathways to poor quality of life seems to be childhood depression,” Janicke said. “If a parent is distressed, that seems to impact a child’s symptoms of depression, which then impacts quality of life….. And it seems to affect not just the emotional aspect of quality of life, but also their health status.”

(Source)

Depression was a factor in Barb’ decision to start looking into boarding schools for her teenage son. Barb had lost both her parents after long illnesses, both within a small span of time. Wading through funerals and selling her parents home had plunged Barb into an enervating depression.

“My mother was depressed and she never sought treatment. I don’t want Sean to have to wade through that kind of toxic soup. I’m lucky I can send him away while I work through this.”

My nephew lives in Montana where officials are in a battle against the worst infestation of meth production and addiction in the country. It turns out that teen boarding schools are growing in popularity there. Teen age drug abuse takes on an entirely different and menacing complexion when the drug is meth.

My nephew reported that two neighbors have opted to send their teens to a private boarding school because of the overwhelming prevalence of meth and meth culture in their community.

His neighbor made a very sad observation: “It began to seem like I was sending my daughter off to war every time she drove off to school. These meth addicts are dangerous, violent and they are everywhere.”

“Karen, whose parents were both addicts, grew up around drugs. She recalls as a child picking her father’s used needles off the floor.

She started shooting and smoking cocaine before progressing to methamphetamines.

The first time she shot up she was 16.

As she speaks, she rubs blotches of facial acne.

“This is the drug coming out of my system,” she says, noting meth has also started to burn holes through her nose.

Despite developing pockets of infection throughout her body, she still craved the drug, she says.
[…]
“I’ve been raped numerous times. You’re bought and sold but nobody cares,” she says. “I was sold by boyfriends to support their habits.”

She says she willingly gave up custody of her children because she knew her drug habit was hurting them.

Though not yet 30, she says she felt “too old to change.”

(Source)

That is what has become so unnerving. Addiction is now becoming two and three generations deep, each disintegrating family perpetuating the poison of drugs from one generation to the next, weakening, inch by inch, the social fabrics of entire communities.

Boot camps and military boarding schools could end up being a parents’ last refuge as the public educational system devolves into some vast playground for psychologists and social engineers. From schools that prohibit the use of the word “failure”, to playgrounds stripped of tall slides and high flying swings, to little leagues who don’t keep score for fear that the loosing team will feel like losers, the latest pop trends in education are ripping the spine out of our nation’s youth.

Constantly buffered from the realities of life, cocooned from ever feeling the consequences of their actions, we are raising a generation of enervated, spoiled and crippled teens. Talk about teens at risk? It’s as if we are programming them to be perpetually at risk.Deprived of the strength of character that hardship and loss teaches, they are utterly unprepared to say no to drugs.

Michael Ungar, author of “Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive”, writes the following:

“In our mania to provide emotional life jackets for our kids, helmets and seat belts, approved playground equipment, after-school supervision, an endless stream of evening programming, and no place to hang out but the local mall, we parents are accidentally creating a generation of youth who are not ready for life,” Ungar writes.”

(Source)

You are not likely to find that philosophy being perpetuated in the pristine and orderly halls of a school governed by the same principles and disciplines that have turned boys into men and girls into women for decades.Be it a brat camp for the summer or a or a school for troubled teens, parents will serve their teens well to look into alternatives to a public school system that no longer seems to challenge our teens for fear of breaking them.

And that is a loss of a lot of good minds.

Teen boarding schools seem an unlikely refuge, but that is how Adam felt about his school. It was a refuge from the bitter, drawn out divorce between his parents. It was a place where he wouldn’t have to see his younger sister’s sadness and tears.

Fortunately for Adam and his parents, it was a school staffed by professionals and mental health experts who knew how to recognize and deal with teen depression. Not exactly a troubled teen boarding school, it seemed to have a high percentage of students who had little or no family life.

Though perhaps “privileged”, these teens had no contact with jet hopping parents and divorce was a commonality that they all seemed to share along with the depression and emotional upheaval that troubled teenagers in the midst of a divorce have to master.

Adam pushed through the depression for the sake of his sister. He wanted to be the one “sane person” she could talk to. He went so far as to confront his parents about how their screaming matches and hostility was hurting everyone. With support from his school and a few referrals, all of the family ended up receiving counseling to help them through the trauma.

MyWellnessDiary.com offers some good articles on depression and divorce. A few are excerpted below.

“Here are some steps to decrease the chance of your divorce and child depression

1. Honesty is the best policy: Be honest with yourself about the potential for emotional trauma in your individual children.

2. Communication: Allow your children to communicate openly with each parent.

3. Choices: By offering your children choices, whenever possible, will increase their sense of control over their lives.

4. Support: Get the proper support for yourself and your children, It may differ for each individual.

5. Normal Activities: By keeping life as normal as you can with the same routine, same activities.”

(Source)