Troubled Teens Resources

Parents researching schools for troubled teens are naturally apprehensive. How to discern good advice from bad, how to determine which programs being offered are appropriate for their teen’s issues? Should the school be close to home, or far away? What will their insurance cover? How often will they see their teens? Is there follow up?

Teen Options offers an informative podcast that will help parents sort through their options. In fact, all of Troubled Teen Resource’s sites are replete with information for parents of troubled teens. But how do you evaluate the staff? These are the people who will study the teens in their charge in order to motivate, counsel and instruct them. What constitutes a good leader for youth?

Just so happens, I’ve run into some suggestions for that answer:

“…the five characteristics present in those who most effectively work with young people:

• they see genuine potential in youth.
• They put youth at the center of their programs.
• They believe they can make a difference with youth.
• They feel they are contributing to the community something they owe.
• They are “unyieldingly authentic.”

(source)

Having worked with youth, and long ago, having been one of those youth who were “worked with”, I can vouch for the desirability of the above traits. Authenticity can permeate even the most determined defenses. Teens may yet resist what they are being taught, but they have an instinct for detecting hypocrisy, at least they do when they take measure of those who will tell them how they need to live.

Likewise, passion for youth is almost mandatory, and you’ll find evidence of that passion in the resumes of the counselors and teachers at professionally staffed schools.

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder concerns have produced much in the way of teen crisis intervention programs to address the constellation of behavioral problems that accompany it. Now there is new information for parents of ADHD teens to digest concerning the possible affects of Ritalin.

Teen help for adolescents diagnosed with ADHD, Is thankfully, far more extensive than just a few years ago with new studies emerging offering a great deal of hope for non-medicinal treatments. Parents distressed by the latest studies on Ritalin can find many other choices to consider.

“Young children taking Ritalin for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder may experience chemical changes in their brains, say U.S. researchers who expressed concern about long-term prescriptions.

In one of the few studies to probe the effects of Ritalin on the neurochemistry of the developing brain, scientists found changes in areas linked to “higher executive functioning, addiction and appetite, social relationships and stress,” the study’s senior author Dr. Teresa Milner, a neuroscientist at New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College, said in a release.

The findings, published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest doctors must be careful in their diagnosis of ADHD before prescribing Ritalin. That’s because the brain changes noted in the study might be helpful in battling the disorder but harmful to youngsters with healthy brain chemistry, said Dr. Milner.”

(Source)