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

Are you searching for boot camps in or around Gainesville, Florida to deal with a defiant teen? Find out 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 demonstrates deliberate disregard for authority, constantly displays rebellious behavior, gets into frequent and growing disturbances with the law, and lacks cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help reform your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Gainesville, Florida Can Help Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Popular impression gives military schools, especially boot camps, a reputation for making errant teens into respectable young citizens. In truth, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps offer an intensive focus on discipline, personal responsibility and respect for authority. Programs like these can send a wake-up call to a teen who might otherwise ruin his life with crime. For those who respond well to 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 Boys Change their Behavior, But Many Teen Issues Go Beyond the Behavior

Although 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 emotional problems. Boot camps rely entirely on modifying behavior; they do not include the counseling or therapeutic input to help teens heal from the true root issues. For teens with anxiety, depression, drug use, poor self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most forms 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 Gainesville, Florida on their own will not speak to 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 Gainesville, Florida 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 style with the therapeutic aspect 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 locations all across the country for well over 20 years. Troubled teenage boys from Gainesville, Florida and other places benefit from an accredited education, counseling and teaching, instruction in military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are renowned. Gateway offers a  loving staff that cares deeply about each teen. Gateway is a military-style school that includes a number of essential 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 realize the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens deal with problems 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 Gainesville, 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!