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

Are you looking for boot camps close to Chesterfield, Virginia to deal with a out-of-control teen? Read on to see how boot camps can help troubled teens and learn about how Gateway’s program may be even more successful for your teen.

If your teen exhibits deliberate disregard for authority, forever displays rebellious behavior, gets into frequent and growing disturbances with the law, and lacks motivation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help improve your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Chesterfield, Virginia Can Help Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Popular conception gives military schools, especially boot camps, a reputation for making badly behaved teens get back on the straight and narrow path. In fact, there are several positive ways in which boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps give a crash course in discipline, personal responsibility and respect for authority. Programs like these can send a wake-up call to a teen who is moving toward a life of crime. For the ones who are shaped by 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 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 adolescent issues are more complicated than they seem on the surface and are only the symptoms of other issues. Boot camps rely entirely on behavior modification; they do not include the therapy to help teens deal with the true underlying issues. For teens with anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, low 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 Chesterfield, Virginia fail to deal with underlying issues and attitudes 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 Chesterfield, 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 benefits of the military approach with the therapeutic component of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, located in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has helped – and brought hope to- struggling teenage boys and their families from cities all across the country for well over 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Chesterfield, Virginia and other places receive an accredited education, counseling and instruction, instruction in military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are known. Gateway offers a  loving staff that cares deeply about each teen. Gateway is a military-style school that features a number of important components that are typically absent from boot camps. Those include: 

• Caring staff and mentors who provide positive role models and concerned involvement, not simply breaking teens down.
• Biblical instruction and spiritual focus, to help teens discover the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens work through struggles and replace harmful 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 Chesterfield, 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!