Boot Camps in Charlottesville, Virginia Can Help Troubled Teens, if They Are Like Gateway Boys Academy

Are you searching for boot camps close to Charlottesville, Virginia to straighten out a defiant teen? See how boot camps can help troubled teens and consider how Gateway’s program may be even more successful for your teen.

If your teen demonstrates blatant disregard for authority, forever displays oppositional behavior, gets into regular and growing disturbances with the law, and shows no motivation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help improve your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Charlottesville, Virginia Can Help Troubled Teens Learn to Respect Authority

Popular conception gives military schools, especially boot camps, a reputation for making out-of-control teens into respectable young citizens. In fact, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps offer a crash course in discipline, personal responsibility and regard for authority. Programs like these can send a powerful message to a teen who might otherwise ruin his life with crime. For those 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 respectable 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 cases, most adolescent issues are much more complex than they seem on the surface and are often only symptoms of other emotional problems. Boot camps focus entirely on modifying behavior; they do not provide the therapeutic support to help teens deal with the true root issues. For teens displaying anxiety, depression, drug use, poor self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most types of rebellious behavior, the stressful 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 Charlottesville, Virginia fail to solve deeper issues but simply return a somewhat more respectful 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 Charlottesville, Virginia 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 strengths of the military approach with the therapeutic aspect of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has helped – and brought restoration to- struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the nation for more than 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Charlottesville, Virginia and other places receive an accredited academic program, counseling and teaching, an introduction to military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are respected. Gateway offers a  loving staff that cares deeply about each teen. Gateway is a military-style school that features several essential components that are typically absent from boot camps. Those include: 

• Caring staff and mentors who provide positive role models and constructive  input, not simply breaking teens down.
• Biblical teaching and spiritual focus, to help teens realize the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens deal with 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 Charlottesville, Virginia, 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!