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

Are you trying to find boot camps close to Lake City, Florida to straighten out a defiant teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and look at how Gateway’s program may prove even more effective for your teen.

If your teen exhibits deliberate disregard for authority, constantly displays rebellious behavior, gets into frequent and growing trouble with the law, and shows no motivation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help improve your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Lake City, Florida Can Help At-Risk Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Popular impression gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making out-of-control 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 integrity 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 destructive 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

Even though boot camps can help troubled teens in some cases, most adolescent issues are much more complex than they appear on the surface and are only the symptoms of other problems. Boot camps rely entirely on forcing compliance; they do not provide the therapy to help teens deal with the true root issues. For teens exhibiting anxiety, depression, drug use, poor self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most types of rebellious behavior, the stressful 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 Lake City, Florida, 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 Lake City, 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 benefits of the military style with the therapeutic input of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, found in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has served – and brought restoration to- struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the nation for well over 20 years. Troubled teenage boys from Lake City, Florida and other cities receive an accredited academic program, 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 includes a number of critical components that are typically absent 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 realize the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens address issues and replace self-destructive 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 Lake City, 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!