Troubled Teens Resources

Parents are warned that the initial period of time after a young man or woman returns home from a troubled teen boarding school is a critical part of their continued recovery. Relapse is a realistic concern and the parent or care giver of a troubled teen has to be cognizant of the factors that will tempt the teen to return to drug use.

For anyone who has ever quit smoking cigarettes, they find that they also cut down considerably on coffee or beer. Why? Because the act of drinking the cup of coffee or can of beer is associated with smoking the cigarette that used to accompany it, triggering a craving for nicotine.

For the recovering teen addict, triggers are those places and people that the teen went to and associated with while using drugs. Music can also serve as a powerful trigger, diverting the teen’s attention back to the evocative stimuli that formed a soundtrack to their time as a user.

An effective teen boarding school or brat camp will have equipped the teen to deal with these expected challenges. Learning methods of defeating temptation is simply a necessity in life and it is a coping skill that an effective teen treatment program will impart.

“Among other things, addicted people must learn how to avoid contact with the triggers that may set in motion their brain’s demanding cry for drugs or alcohol. And when those triggers are unavoidable, people must develop the skills that will prevent the craving from taking over. Learning these skills must be a core element of any treatment program; maintaining them should be part of an after care program or long-term recovery plan.”
(source)

They are up at around 6 AM and back to bed by 10. Their day is structured, with each hour allocated either to school work or other program work. They are troubled teens who wanted freedom and their own way and have lost both.

To some troubled teens, being placed in a troubled teen boarding school will be tantamount to being imprisoned. For those teens whose parents never imposed much discipline, this will be classified as extremely cruel and unusual punishment. That is what they will tell parents in the beginning anyway.

Some teens actually believe that they would no longer have to do schoolwork. They are rudely surprised that in the majority of boarding schools and military schools, like Tipton or Meadowlark, that academics are a major part of their day with a demand for an 80% or higher grade in order to progress to each new assignment.

Some teens imagine that they will hang out in cells with their”bro”, shooting the breeze, playing cards, talking smack. These teens are especially dismayed to find themselves at the end of a broom sweeping grounds or at the end of a pair or reins helping out with the horses.

A credible and comprehensive boarding school will touch your troubled teenager’s life in all the areas that they do not want to be touched in. Freedom, authority and discipline.

If all goes well, a good treatment program will have taught the teen that if he masters his behavior in these three areas that he has written himself a very powerful check to cash in when entering back into his regular teenage existence.

Whatever your troubled teen may have imagined boarding school to be, they will find themselves wrong, but ultimately, in the end, they’ll know it was the right place at the right time.

Allow me to bring to your attention a very candid,thorough account of one parents search for a teenage treatment program, boarding or military school.  As health professionals, they bring a different and valuable perspective to the process of evaluating various teen academies.
It’s a long piece that you can click over and read. We reproduce some key excerpts below:

“Parents of children and youth with severe emotional and behavioral problems soon discover that there are numerous roadblocks to seeking effective treatment. Most states have laws that restrict parents’ ability to deal effectively with their children’s serious behavior problems. Parents are legally and civilly responsible for the actions of their children, but they have very little legal authority to intervene in a serious way In most states, for example, parents can neither have their child drug tested nor receive the results of a drug test unless the child gives authorization. Additionally, in most states, parents must receive the child’s permission before placing him or her in a treatment facility. Parents can go through complex and lengthy legal proceedings to have their children hospitalized, but emergencies usually demand immediate action. Add to this the difficulties with managed care, where treatment often benefits the bottom line rather than the patient, and you have a very difficult situation.”

[..]

“Once we made the decision to place Jamie in a residential facility, we began an intensive and systematic search to identify the facility that would best meet his needs. We researched residential programs whose orientations ranged from medical to wilderness survival. We wanted specific information about their educational and treatment programs, average length of stay, and — most important — outcomes experienced by people who had completed their programs.

The information we received was at best confusing and very general. Very few facilities had any real information concerning their program’s effectiveness. Many institutions indicated that their programs were highly effective, and we were provided with testimonial evidence, but when we pressed for specific numbers, we discovered that virtually none of the institutions had any data on program effectiveness or outcomes of the youth they had graduated.

Equally disturbing were the answers we received when we asked how youth progressed through the treatment programs. In most cases, the answers suggested that there was little if any organized system of program advancement. There were some programs that had well-thought-out plans that were specifically linked to improvements in the youth’s behavior, but these were few and far between. What was abundant across institutions was the barrage of mail, videos, advertisements, phone calls, and promotional offers that we received.”
from Difficult Decisions: Lessons Learned From One Family’s Story of Residential Placement/William H Evans

The authors also produce a questionnaire - Questions to Ask When Considering Residential Placement - that will help a parent structure their own search for a troubled teen boarding school.