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

Are you looking for boot camps close to Cumberland, Maryland to straighten out a defiant teen? See how boot camps can help troubled teens and discover how Gateway’s program may prove even more beneficial for your teen.

If your teen exhibits deliberate disregard for authority, unceasingly displays defiant behavior, gets into regular and escalating trouble with the law, and lacks cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help reform your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Cumberland, Maryland Can Help At-Risk Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Public impression gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making wayward teens put their lives in order. In truth, 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 powerful message to a teen who is moving toward a life of crime. For the ones who respond well to 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 manageable behavior. But those bad attitudes often return.

Boot Camps Can Help Troubled Adolescents 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 adolescent issues run much deeper than they appear on the surface and are only the symptoms of other issues. Boot camps rely entirely on behavior modification; they do not provide the therapy to help teens heal from the true underlying issues. For teens exhibiting anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, low self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most forms of rebellious behavior, the stressful boot camp environment may prove counterproductive instead, if it isn’t set up in a way that the discipline is coupled with Christian love and support.

Most boot camps in Cumberland, Maryland on their own will not address family concerns but simply return a somewhat more compliant 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 Cumberland, Maryland 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 another option that combines the benefits 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 worked with – and brought hope to- struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the country for well over 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Cumberland, Maryland and other places receive an accredited education, counseling and teaching, instruction in 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 includes several important components that are typically missing from boot camps. Those include: 

• Caring staff and mentors who provide positive role models and individual mentorship, 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 work through 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 Cumberland, 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!