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

Are you trying to find boot camps close to Chester, Virginia to deal with a out-of-control teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and discover how Gateway’s program may prove even more beneficial for your teen.

If your teen shows deliberate disregard for authority, unceasingly displays oppositional behavior, gets into regular and escalating disturbances with the law, and shows no cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp will help bring him back to his senses. 

Boot Camps in Chester, Virginia Can Help At-Risk Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Popular impression gives military schools, especially boot camps, a reputation for making badly behaved teens put their lives in order. In fact, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps offer a crash course in discipline, personal integrity and respect for authority. Programs like these can send a wake-up call to a teen who might otherwise ruin his life with 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 destructive habits, to more respectable behavior. But those bad attitudes often return.

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

Even though boot camps can help troubled teens in some situations, most teenage issues are more complicated than they appear on the surface and may only be symptoms of other problems. Boot camps rely entirely on modifying behavior; they do not provide the counseling or therapeutic input to help teens address the true root issues. For teens showing anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, low self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most types of rebellious behavior, the strict discipline of the 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 Chester, Virginia on their own will not address family problems 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 Chester, 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 component of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has served – and brought hope to- struggling teenage boys and their families from places all across the nation for more than 20 years. Troubled teenage boys from Chester, Virginia and other places benefit from an accredited academic program, counseling and teaching, instruction in 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 features several critical components that are typically missing from boot camps. Those include: 

• Caring staff and mentors who provide positive role models and concerned involvement, 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 work through struggles and replace destructive patterns with healthy new choices.
• 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 Chester, 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!