Troubled Teens Resources

Brat camp taught the Carter family a lesson that they hadn’t expected to learn. Their teen daughter Amy, diagnosed two years ago with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, had been having a rough time in school. Her parents reviewed all the therapies possible, including Ritalin and Adderal but opted to work with a counselor who coached Amy how to manage her ADHD through behavioral techniques and awareness therapies. Though much improvement was made, the death of a close friend threatened her stability and Amy was still struggling with deep anxiety and anger.

Brat camp seemed like a place Amy could run her energies and exasperations into the ground. The camps location in a mountain ranch seemed an idyllic setting. It proved to be more than that. It turned Amy around. Living in a big city, Amy rarely rode a bike, never climbed trees, never held a fishing pole or had a pet. She fell in love with working with the brat camp animals and felt content after the demands of long days caring for stock.

Her parents are convinced that Amy’s exposure to nature made all the difference. Experts are apt to agree with them. Amy is now happily enrolled in a troubled teen boarding school with an emphasis on agriculture and animal husbandry.

“Richard Louv, futurist and author of Last Child in the Woods; Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, says our actions — and in some cases, lack of actions — have caused our children to become alienated from the natural world, and their resulting disconnection may be contributing to increasing diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression and childhood obesity.

Louv was the keynote speaker at the recent Outdoor Writers Association of America Conference in Roanoke, Virginia. His presentation, adapted from his book, carried a profound and deeply disturbing message, one that every outdoorsman and woman, as well as every parent, must take to heart. It boils down to this: nature, in the broad, sweeping sense of the word, fills a critical need in the human psyche, and we eliminate its influence on our children only at great risk to them and to our society as a whole.”

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Before there were computers or video games or 24/7 television programming and Ipods for entertainment, there was something else responsible for providing adolescents with recreation and mental stimulation. It was called the imagination.

Where did it go and can we bring it back and what does imagination have to do with teen crisis intervention? A new program in Massachusetts has opened up the “great outdoors” to unplug from the cyber and media world and provide a new landscape where teens can reacquaint themselves with the power of their own imagination.

“The Blue Hills Reservation will be the site of the kick-off event in a “No Child Left Inside” campaign being announced today by state recreation officials.
[..]
The initiative — whose website, greatparkpursuit.org, goes online today — is state recreation officials’ response to an epidemic of childhood hours lost to indoor entertainment.”

Exercising the imagination opens doorways and facilitates the development of critical thinking skills. A teen can come to understand how much control they can actually exercise in their own lives by learning to actively participate in creating those lives as opposed to having their identity and choices defined by the media or culture.

A teen who is confident in their ability to make good choices does not choose drugs. A kid who can “imagine” his way to healthy resolutions for the emotional mazes of adolescence won’t be detoured by peer pressure.

“The Department of Conservation and Recreation wants children to “disconnect from cyberspace and reconnect with open space…”
Recreation commissions around the country are awakening to the need to draw children away from electronics and to the outdoors, said Geigis, who pointed to the influence of Richard Louv’s much-discussed book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.”
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Summer is here. Maybe it’s time for parents to experiment with becoming an “unplugged family”.