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

Are you looking into boot camps in or around Auburn, New York to try to help a defiant teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and discover how Gateway’s program may be even more successful for your teen.

If your teen exhibits unashamed disregard for authority, constantly displays defiant behavior, gets into regular and increasing trouble with the law, and shows no motivation in school, perhaps a boot camp will help bring him back to his senses. 

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

Public conception gives military schools, especially boot camps, a reputation for making out-of-control teens get back on the straight and narrow path. As a matter of fact, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps provide an intensive focus on discipline, personal integrity and regard for authority. Programs like these can send a powerful message to a teen who is moving toward a life of crime. For those teens who are shaped by it, boot camps can give them a new understanding of the consequences of their actions. For certain people, boot camps can initially help them move from destructive 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

Although boot camps can help troubled teens in some situations, most teenage issues run much deeper than they seem on the surface and may only be symptoms of other problems. Boot camps focus entirely on behavior modification; they do not include the therapeutic support to help teens address the true underlying issues. For teens displaying 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 harmful instead, if it isn’t set up in a way that the discipline is coupled with Christian love and support.

Most boot camps in Auburn, New York fail to deal with underlying issues and attitudes but simply return a somewhat more respectful teen to the same home situation in which he was struggling. Boys who attend boot camps are more likely to return to old habits.  In fact, boot camps in Auburn, New York may be 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 strengths of the military style with the therapeutic aspect of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has worked with – and brought restoration to- struggling teenage boys and their families from cities all across the nation for well over 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Auburn, New York and other places benefit from an accredited education, counseling and instruction, an introduction to military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are renowned. Gateway offers a  loving staff that cares deeply about each teen. Gateway is a military-style school that includes several 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 address problems and replace self-destructive patterns with healthy new habits.
• Family healing 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 Auburn, 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!