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

Are you searching for boot camps near Merritt Island, Florida to try to help a defiant teen? Find out how boot camps can help troubled teens and learn about how Gateway’s program may prove even more beneficial for your teen.

If your teen shows unashamed disregard for authority, forever displays defiant behavior, gets into frequent and increasing trouble with the law, and shows no cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help improve your troubled teen. 

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

Public impression gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making unruly teens into respectable young citizens. In fact, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps give an intensive focus on discipline, personal responsibility and respect for authority. Programs like these can send a powerful message to a teen who might otherwise ruin his life with crime. For those teens who are shaped by 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 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

Despite the fact that boot camps can help troubled teens in some situations, most adolescent issues are much more complex than they seem on the surface and are often only symptoms of other problems. Boot camps focus entirely on behavior modification; they do not provide the counseling or therapeutic input to help teens heal from the true root issues. For teens showing anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, low 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 Merritt Island, Florida fail to solve deeper issues 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 Merritt Island, Florida 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 strengths of the military style with the therapeutic input of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has helped – and brought restoration to- struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the country for well over 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Merritt Island, 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 features 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 discover the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens work through 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 Merritt Island, 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!