Troubled Teens Resources

America isn’t the only country with troubled teenagers who are better served by a specialty school or schools for troubled teens. A state sponsored program in New Zealand takes a slightly different strategy in educating their out of control teens, with more of an emphasis on education that will likely assist their troubled teenagers with a job in addition to academic credentials.

“It is a day program with classroom time in the morning and in the afternoon the teens learn practical farming skills such as fencing, managing horses, horticulture as well as workshop skills such as engineering and welding.

“The simple fact, is that our kids don’t fit within the school model. [We teach] those general practical things – still from an education basis but looking at that outcome of learning for the future,” he said.”

The tenets to which this school subscribes are universal values that defy all of the pop psychology thrown at the problem of troubled teenagers; Motivation, Work Ethic, Belief in Self.

“So we actually end up with a plan of action around the young person and, while you get some sort of resistance, as you start knocking off all those problems you start to resolve the situation. And I think that is actually what makes us different,” he said. The most successful cases are those where parents also participate.”

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The essential need for parents to be closely involved in their teens education is also a universal value. In the end, it would seem this ageless wisdom will always be superior to the coddling and victim card mentality presently handed to teenagers in the public educational system.

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.”

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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.