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

Are you trying to find boot camps close to Ocoee, Florida to deal with a rebellious teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and learn about how Gateway’s program may be even more effective for your teen.

If your teen demonstrates blatant disregard for authority, constantly displays defiant behavior, gets into frequent and growing trouble with the law, and lacks cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help reform your troubled teen. 

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

Public impression gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making unruly teens get back on the straight and narrow path. In truth, there are several positive ways in which boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps give a crash course in discipline, personal responsibility and regard for authority. Programs like these can be a means of rescuing a teen who is moving toward a life of crime. For those teens who are shaped by 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 Adolescents Change their Behavior, But Many Teen Issues Go Beyond the Behavior

Despite the fact that boot camps can help troubled teens in some cases, most adolescent issues run much deeper than they seem on the surface and are often only symptoms of other emotional problems. Boot camps focus entirely on modifying behavior; they do not offer the counseling or therapeutic input to help teens heal from the true root issues. For teens with anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, low self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most types 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 Ocoee, Florida fail to deal with underlying issues and attitudes but simply return a somewhat more respectful 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 Ocoee, 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 another option that combines the benefits 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 helped – and brought restoration to- struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the nation for more than 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Ocoee, Florida and other cities receive an accredited academic program, counseling and teaching, instruction in military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are respected. Gateway offers staff that care deeply about each student. Gateway is a military-style school that includes several critical components that are typically absent 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 emphasis, to help teens realize the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens deal with struggles 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 Ocoee, 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!