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

Are you trying to find boot camps close to Lighthouse Point, Florida to straighten out a defiant teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and consider how Gateway’s program may be even more beneficial for your teen.

If your teen shows deliberate disregard for authority, unceasingly displays defiant behavior, gets into frequent and escalating disturbances with the law, and shows no cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp will help bring him back to his senses. 

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

Popular opinion gives military schools, especially boot camps, a reputation for making errant teens get back on the straight and narrow path. As a matter of 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 send a powerful message to a teen who is moving toward a life of crime. For those teens 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 self-defeating habits, to more respectable behavior. But those bad attitudes often return.

Boot Camps Can Help Troubled Teens 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 much more complex than they seem on the surface and may only be symptoms of other emotional problems. Boot camps focus entirely on forcing compliance; they do not include the counseling or therapeutic input to help teens address the true underlying issues. For teens displaying anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, poor self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most forms 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 Lighthouse Point, Florida on their own will not deal with family concerns but simply return a somewhat more obedient teen to the same home situation in which he was struggling. Boys who attend boot camps are more likely to return to old habits.  In fact, boot camps in Lighthouse Point, 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 approach with the therapeutic input of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, located in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has helped thousands of struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the country for more than 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Lighthouse Point, Florida and other places receive an accredited academic program, counseling and instruction, 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 features several important 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 instruction and spiritual emphasis, to help teens discover the true source of lasting heart change.
• Counseling, to help teens work through struggles and replace 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 Lighthouse Point, 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!