Troubled Teens Resources

You already have a troubled teen that you have successfully placed in a boarding school with an excellent drug therapy program. You are reassured of her progress and grateful that you were able to find a boarding school, or in this case, a brat camp that met your teens emotional needs and academic requirements.
But you are now thinking ahead to when your two toddlers enter into the higher grades and become subject to the influence of drug abusing peers. There wasn’t much in the way of community support available for you when you were seeking placement of your older child and you want to see that change.
There are many programs to explore. One such interesting program is Parent Corps.

“The Parent Corps is a new, national effort dedicated to helping parents prevent their children from using alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs. Modeled on the same principles as the Peace Corps, it harnesses the power of parents working together to keep their children drug free. The Parent Corps recruits, trains, certifies, and pays part-time or full-time salaries to Parent Leaders for two years of service. It institutionalizes the parent movement of the late 1970s into the early 1990s. That movement proved it could change social norms and get results, cutting past-month drug use by two-thirds among adolescents and young adults between 1979 and 1992.
[…]
Drug prevention programs have been around for a long time. Some are aimed at parents, most are aimed at children. Nearly all provide short-term courses on the dangers of drugs and ways to avoid use.

The Parent Corps is an ongoing process that offers parents a strong peer support network grounded by a Parent Leader. Like the neighborhood of yesterday, where everyone looked after every child on the street, Parent Leaders alert parents to the marketing machine behind drugs and help them immunize children against it. The vision is to have Parent Leader in every school in the country by 2014.”

What do Parent Leaders do?

• contact all parents in the school
• educate them about how drugs affect children
• teach them about how children are at risk
• persuade them to believe research showing that they are the most powerful influences in their children’s lives
• mobilize them into groups that stop the marketing of drugs to children
• create a support network that fosters the growth of healthy children capable of reaching their full potential

You can find out how to start a Parent Corps for your community here.

“Unfortunately, many adults do not really believe that young people possess the quality of “greatness,” which is perhaps not surprising since youth seldom are provided with opportunities to display their true human potentials. Positive Peer Culture is concerned with setting expectations high enough to challenge the young person to do all he is capable of doing. To expect less is to deprive him of the opportunity of feeling as positively about himself as possible.”

As a parent of a struggling teen you will have already accumulated a great deal of information on a variety of boarding schools, boot camps, and wilderness schools. Much as a student decides on academic curriculum, a parent will be seeking a boarding school for their teenager that incorporates curriculum and programs that will supply their teenager with simple, viable tools with which to modify their behavior and tools with which to successfully navigate through the traumas and pain that life inevitably brings.

The teenager often has no ability to recognize their “own greatness“. Indeed, quite the opposite occurs within a unhappy teenager’s mind; self-loathing,doubt, and shame will blind a young person from recognizing the wealth of strength and talent that they have yet to tap into.

It is very hard to destroy what you value and once a teen is able to experientially comprehend the value and gifts that they possess, their instinct will be to nurture and protect who they are, not self-destruct. To successfully walk in the power of one’s own strength, to supply the wind for one’s own sails, is headier than any narcotic available. Ask any teen who has successfully embraced their recovery programs and shed their addictions. The radiance of renewal and recovery is unmistakable.

” Positive Peer Culture makes no pretense of turning over all decision making to the students. Adults never abdicate their authority or responsibility. Instead Positive Peer Culture is so designed that adults are in control without controlling. A flight instructor does not give full control to the student pilot but is always available to take charge if hazards are encountered while the student learns to fly. So in Positive Peer Culture, adults assign responsibility to youth and then teach them to follow through on that responsibility.

The notion of heavy demands on students is not altogether fashionable, and traditional mental health concepts have sometimes been interpreted to say that setting high expectations actually is harmful for young people; hence, those with problems sometimes have not been sufficiently challenged to use the strength they possess. These ideas were criticized by Victor Frankl.

“If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if the therapists wish to foster the patients’ mental health they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation towards the meaning of one’s life.’”
(Source)

Any boarding school or youth camp a parent chooses will need to incorporate programs and disciplines compatible with the teenager who is in criss. Positive Peer Culture presents another school of thought that parents will want to investigate when deciding which boarding school will prove the best fit for their teenager.