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

Are you searching for boot camps in or around Crofton, Maryland to try to help a defiant teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and look at how Gateway’s program may prove even more successful for your teen.

If your teen shows deliberate disregard for authority, forever displays defiant behavior, gets into frequent and growing trouble with the law, and lacks cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp will help bring him back to his senses. 

Boot Camps in Crofton, Maryland Can Help Troubled Teens Learn to Respect Authority

Popular opinion gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making unruly teens put their lives in order. In fact, there are several positive ways in which boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps give a crash course in discipline, personal integrity and respect for authority. Programs like these can send a powerful message to a teen who is moving toward a life of crime. For those teens 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 self-defeating habits, to more respectable behavior. But those bad attitudes often return.

Boot Camps Can Help Troubled Boys 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 run much deeper than they seem on the surface and are only the symptoms of other issues. Boot camps focus entirely on forcing compliance; they do not provide the therapeutic support to help teens resolve the true underlying issues. For teens with anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, low self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most instances 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 Crofton, Maryland, on their own, will not speak to family concerns but return a somewhat more compliant teen to the same circumstances in which he struggled. Boys who attend boot camps are more likely to return to old habits.  In fact, boot camps in Crofton, 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 another option that combines the strengths of the military style with the therapeutic input of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, located in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has served thousands of struggling teenage boys and their families from cities all across the country for more than 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Crofton, Maryland and other cities receive an accredited academic program, counseling and teaching, instruction in 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 includes a number of important components that are typically missing 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 find the true source of lasting heart change.
• Counseling, to help teens address problems and replace harmful 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 Crofton, 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!