Troubled Teens Resources

Troubled teenagers typically spend an inordinate amount of time plugged into some kind of media. As many public school institutions have dropped gym programs, fewer and fewer teenagers get regular exercise or ever go outdoors except to get into cars and buses and go indoors somewhere else.

One parent was amazed to find children at his kid’s summer camp who had never, ever spent a night camping or in a wilderness situation. Teens at risk who have never had the chance to leave their inner city homes have never seen acres and acres of wide open spaces.

And of course, studies are now making the rounds pinpointing this cave-like behavior as the cause of a number of adolescent ills, from obesity, ADHD to teen age drug abuse.

“Society is sending an unintended message to children - nature is past, electronics are the future and the boogeyman lives in the woods,” Louv wrote in a 2005 article in The Oregonian. “The script is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. This message is effectively banning much of the kind of play we enjoyed as children.”

Outdoor classrooms have proved to curb attention deficit disorder, and they also boost test scores, grade-point averages and problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, Louv writes.”

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America is rich with parks; city parks, state parks, wildlife preserves. If you have to rent a car for the week-end, make the effort to acquaint your teenagers with the great outdoors.

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder is said to dissipate to a great degree by exposing teens at risk to the great outdoors. When you think about it, this “disorder” didn’t exist, for all intents and purposes, thirty years ago. Not saying the condition wasn’t perhaps present, or that some of us aren’t wired to proceed through life at 90 miles an hour. Just suggesting that thirty years ago, when a kid jumped on his bike and sailed out of the driveway, that need to go fast, to satisfy restlessness, to get a constant stream of stimuli, was satisfied.

Consider this sad fact, out of Los Angeles.

“In San Diego, 90 percent of youngsters do not know how to swim and 34 percent have never been to the ocean even though it is only 15, 20 minutes away from their homes, according to the organization, Aquatic Adventure, which is trying to change that.

Because kids don’t bike much anymore, either for transportation or recreation, bicycle sales are down 31 percent in the past five years. The outdoors industry is surviving by selling high-end expensive equipment to adults rather than entry-level gear for kids.”

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Nostalgic though it may be, those days of yore when there were three TV channels and kids preferred the company of their pals over the latest MTV reality show, were days when you rarely heard the phrase teen age drug abuse. Neither did you hear the words ADD, meth labs, or Ritalin.

No, you can’t bring the innocence of long ago back, but you can raise your troubled teen according to the same principles; play hard, work hard. A teen who does that all summer instead of getting down with his iPod won’t need to hear those words either.