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

Are you looking into boot camps in or around Clermont, Florida to try to help a rebellious teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and consider how Gateway’s program may be even more beneficial for your teen.

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

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

Popular opinion gives military schools, especially boot camps, a reputation for making unruly 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 responsibility and respect for authority. Programs like these can be a means of rescuing 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 individuals, boot camps can initially help them move from unhealthy habits, to more appropriate behavior. But those bad attitudes often return.

Boot Camps Can Help Troubled Boys 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 teenage issues run much deeper than they appear on the surface and are often only symptoms of other emotional problems. Boot camps rely entirely on forcing compliance; they do not offer the therapeutic support to help teens heal from the true underlying issues. For teens exhibiting 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 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 Clermont, Florida on their own will not address family concerns 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 Clermont, 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 an alternative that combines the strengths of the military style with the therapeutic input of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has helped – and brought hope to- struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the country for more than 20 years. Troubled teenage boys from Clermont, Florida and other places receive an accredited academic program, counseling and instruction, an introduction to military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are renowned. Gateway offers staff that care deeply about each student. 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 individual mentorship, not simply breaking teens down.
• Biblical instruction and spiritual focus, to help teens realize the true source of lasting heart change.
• Counseling, to help teens deal with 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 Clermont, 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!