Boot Camps in Oceanside, New York Can Help Troubled Teens, if They Are Like Gateway Boys Academy

Are you researching boot camps in or around Oceanside, New York to straighten out a defiant teen? Find out how boot camps can help troubled teens and consider how Gateway’s program may prove even more beneficial for your teen.

If your teen exhibits blatant disregard for authority, commonly displays defiant behavior, gets into frequent and escalating trouble with the law, and shows no cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help reform your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Oceanside, New York Can Help Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Popular conception 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 a crash course in discipline, personal integrity 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 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 unhealthy 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 adolescent issues are more complicated than they appear on the surface and may only be symptoms of other problems. Boot camps rely entirely on forcing compliance; they do not offer the therapy to help teens resolve 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 stressful boot camp environment may prove detrimental instead, if it isn’t set up in a way that the discipline is coupled with Christian love and support.

Most boot camps in Oceanside, New York on their own will not deal with family problems 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 Oceanside, New York 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 another option 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 worked with thousands of struggling teenage boys and their families from locations all across the country for well over 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Oceanside, New York and other cities receive an accredited education, counseling and instruction, an introduction to military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are respected. 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 individual mentorship, not simply breaking teens down.
• Biblical instruction and spiritual focus, to help teens discover the true source of lasting heart change.
• Counseling, to help teens address problems and replace self-destructive patterns with healthy new choices.
• 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 Oceanside, New York, 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!