Boot Camps in Amsterdam, New York Can Help Troubled Teens, if They Are Like Gateway Boys Academy

Are you searching for boot camps close to Amsterdam, New York to try to help a defiant teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and look at how Gateway’s program may prove even more effective for your teen.

If your teen demonstrates deliberate disregard for authority, forever displays defiant behavior, gets into regular and increasing trouble with the law, and shows no cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help reform your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Amsterdam, New York Can Help Troubled Teens Learn to Respect Authority

Popular impression gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making unruly teens into respectable young citizens. In truth, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps offer a crash course in discipline, personal integrity and regard for authority. Programs like these can send a wake-up call to a teen who is moving toward a life of crime. For those teens who respond well to it, boot camps can give them a new understanding of the consequences of their actions. For some individuals, boot camps can initially help them move from self-defeating habits, to more manageable behavior. But those bad attitudes often return.

Boot Camps Can Help Troubled Adolescents Change their Behavior, But Many Teen Issues Go Beyond the Behavior

Despite the fact that boot camps can help troubled teens in some situations, most adolescent issues run much deeper than they seem on the surface and are only the symptoms of other emotional problems. Boot camps rely entirely on modifying behavior; they do not offer the counseling or therapeutic input to help teens heal from the true root issues. For teens with anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, low self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most forms of rebellious behavior, the stressful boot camp environment may prove counterproductive instead, if it isn’t set up in a way that the discipline is coupled with Christian love and support.

Most boot camps in Amsterdam, New York on their own will not deal with family communication issues but simply return a somewhat more obedient teen to the same home environment in which he was struggling. Boys who attend boot camps are more likely to return to old habits.  In fact, boot camps in Amsterdam, New York are a short-term solution at best, and may be harmful to the teen at worst. Sadly, teens often revert to past behavior after returning home from short-term boot camps, because the length of the program doesn’t instill the attitude changes as a habit in their life.

Gateway’s Boot Camp-Like Program, Plus It’s Ongoing Behavioral Support are Designed to Turn Around Troubled Boys

If you find that a traditional short-term boot camp is not the best choice for your teen, but you still like the idea of what a boot camp teaches, Gateway an alternative that combines the benefits of the military style with the therapeutic component of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has worked with – and brought hope to- struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the nation for well over 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Amsterdam, New York and other places receive an accredited academic program, counseling and instruction, an introduction to military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are known. Gateway offers staff that care deeply about each student. Gateway is a military-style school that includes a number of critical components that are typically absent from boot camps. Those include: 

• Caring staff and mentors who provide positive role models and individual mentorship, not simply breaking teens down.
• Biblical instruction and spiritual focus, to help teens find the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens work through struggles and replace destructive patterns with healthy new habits.
• Family restoration through Biblical instruction and seminars for parents and families.

Boot camps can help troubled teens if they are coupled with a longer term mentoring program like what Gateway offers. We invite you to look beyond Amsterdam, New York, for what may be the best situation your boy…a program with a boot camp element, but also ongoing instruction and mentoring for a longer period of  time.

Gateway is Located in the Panhandle of Florida. Boys Come to Gateway from Around the Country. Call Us!