Boot Camps in Avon Park, Florida Can Help Troubled Teens, if They Are Like Gateway Boys Academy

Are you looking into boot camps in or around Avon Park, Florida to straighten out a rebellious teen? See how boot camps can help troubled teens and look at how Gateway’s program may be even more beneficial for your teen.

If your teen exhibits unashamed disregard for authority, unceasingly displays defiant behavior, gets into frequent and increasing disturbances with the law, and lacks motivation in school, perhaps a boot camp will help bring him back to his senses. 

Boot Camps in Avon Park, Florida Can Help Troubled Teens Learn to Respect Authority

Popular belief gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making badly behaved teens into respectable young citizens. As a matter of fact, there are several positive ways in which boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps provide a crash course in discipline, personal responsibility and respect for authority. Programs like these can send a powerful message to a teen who is moving toward a life of crime. For the ones who respond well to it, boot camps can give them a new understanding of the consequences of their actions. For some teens, boot camps can initially help them move from self-defeating habits, to more appropriate 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 are much more complex than they seem on the surface and are only the symptoms of other issues. Boot camps focus entirely on forcing compliance; they do not include the therapy to help teens resolve the true root issues. For teens displaying anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, poor self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most instances of rebellious behavior, the strict discipline of the boot camp environment may prove detrimental instead, if it isn’t set up in a way that the discipline is coupled with Christian love and support.

Most boot camps in Avon Park, Florida fail to solve deeper issues but simply return a somewhat more obedient 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 Avon Park, Florida are typically 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 another option that combines the benefits of the military style with the therapeutic input of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, found in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has helped – and brought restoration to- struggling teenage boys and their families from locations all across the country for well over 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Avon Park, Florida 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 known. Gateway offers staff that care deeply about each student. Gateway is a military-style school that includes several important 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 emphasis, to help teens discover the true source of lasting heart change.
• Counseling, to help teens address struggles and replace harmful 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 Avon Park, Florida, 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!