Troubled Teens Resources

Teen crisis intervention starts long before your teenager reaches adolescence. Reports indicate that kids as young as nine and ten are choosing to play around with drugs. For good or ill, celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and the thoroughly disgraced Britney Spears can serve as a lesson for your young teens. It’s obvious that they can no longer serve as role models but they can teach teens at risk that drugs can destroy even the best and brightest.

That is one mother dealt with her daughter’s disappointment with Lindsay Lohan.

“I thank Lindsey Lohan for forcing me giving me the opportunity to talk to Ellie about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It’s a conversation I might have saved for later, when she was a bit older, but thanks to the widely reported exploits of this girl, Ellie now has a basic understanding of addiction and the difficulties of recovery.

I am not sure exactly how Ellie found out about Lindsay Lohan’s troubles, but she did. And the look on her face as I explained what happened to her broke my heart. I know Ellie has to grow up sometime and learn about these things, and common wisdom has it that the earlier you begin these conversations, the better off your kids will be. But try as I might, I can’t put a positive spin on the reality that Ellie’s childlike adoration of Lindsay Lohan turned into an innocence-shattering lesson about poor parenting and bad choices.”

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And that is the best thing you can do when your teen’s idols are busted for drugs - use it as a life lesson, a demonstration of how drug addiction can ruin the lives of young people who have everything to live for.

Military boarding schools or other private boarding schools are often the only opportunity that a troubled teenager has to find and focus on a positive role model.

A program aimed at teen crisis intervention in LA has been supplying role models for their delinquent teens for over 19 years. One statement by a volunteer mentor/cop is striking.

“Police sergeant Thurman MacNeal is one of 3,000 men who have trained as Role Models. As a black cop whose interactions with black boys too often involve handcuffs, he says, it can be ”discouraging because so many of these young men have so much talent it’s amazing. But because of other things that are going on with them and because those talents are not being developed . . .” The thought trails away.”

No matter it be via troubled teen boarding school or mentoring program or a small community effort, the biggest gift you can give a troubled teenager is the gift of himself. In order to do so the teen needs an environment and role models that can help them learn what their gifts, skills or interests are and then be given the programs that will help them develop those talents.

“I believe children who have a vision of themselves in the future have hope. And without a vision of yourself in the future, you don’t value your life and consequently, you don’t value the lives of others.”

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“…We don’t talk much about is the way our culture encourages girls to compete with one another at the expense of developing true, meaningful relationships with other girls, and how that simple arrangement can contribute to the way girls mistreat each other, even within so called “friendships”. I’m not talking about competition in academics or athletics. I’m talking about competing against one another for status, popularity, and the attention of boys. We train our girls from an early age, marketing make-up and sexy clothing to girls beginning in grade school, stuffing teen magazines full of articles on how to “get the guy”. Certainly our girls are not missing the message here.

What would it be like if we lived in a world where girls spent their time, energy, and talents working together instead of working against each other? Just imagine what they could accomplish….
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Indeed, just what would healthy friendships and smart relationships mean for today’s teen girls? The writer correctly points out that today’s teenage girls view each other via competitive roles instead of viewing each other as friends and allies.

Increasingly, the role models for teen girls have deteriorated into that of a teenage vamp, instructing girls in sexual one-upmanship instead of pride in achievement. Instead of respecting and encouraging each other in academics and sports, they vie for superiority in the dating scene, often being cruel to those teen girls who do not achieve popularity with the opposite sex and who show little fashion savvy.

All-girl teen boarding schools and academies are often the option concerned parents choose when discouraged and fed up with the public school’s continuing inability to influence teenagers to pursue positive paths and role models.

Girls’ academies teach a different sort of value system that can’t be often found in public schools. A system where pride of achievement and the discipline of hard work is considered meritorious, not the latest pop star styles.