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

Are you looking for boot camps in or around College Park, Maryland to deal with a rebellious teen? Read on to 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 deliberate disregard for authority, forever displays oppositional behavior, gets into regular and escalating trouble with the law, and shows no cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help sort out your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in College Park, Maryland Can Help Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Public opinion 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 responsibility and respect for authority. Programs like these can be a means of rescuing 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 certain people, 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 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 appear on the surface and may only be symptoms of other problems. Boot camps focus entirely on forcing compliance; they do not offer the therapy to help teens address the true underlying issues. For teens showing anxiety, depression, drug use, poor self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most types 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 College Park, Maryland on their own will not deal with family communication 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 College Park, Maryland may be 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 helped thousands of struggling teenage boys and their families from locations all across the country for more than 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from College Park, Maryland and other places benefit from an accredited education, counseling and teaching, an introduction to military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are known. Gateway offers a  compassionate staff that cares deeply about each teen. Gateway is a military-style school that features several essential 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 emphasis, to help teens discover the true source of lasting heart change.
• Counseling, to help teens deal with issues and replace self-destructive patterns with healthy new choices.
• 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 College Park, Maryland, 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!