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

Are you searching for boot camps near Palm Harbor, Florida to straighten out a rebellious teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and discover how Gateway’s program may be even more successful for your teen.

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

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

Public conception gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making errant teens put their lives in order. As a matter of fact, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps provide an intensive focus on discipline, personal responsibility and regard 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 certain people, boot camps can initially help them move from destructive 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

Despite the fact that boot camps can help troubled teens in some cases, most teenage issues are more complicated than they seem on the surface and are only the symptoms of other problems. Boot camps focus entirely on behavior modification; they do not offer the therapy to help teens deal with the true root issues. For teens exhibiting anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, poor self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most instances 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 Palm Harbor, Florida on their own will not address family problems 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 Palm Harbor, 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 benefits of the military approach with the therapeutic input of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has served – and brought hope to- struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the country for more than 20 years. Troubled teenage boys from Palm Harbor, Florida and other places 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 staff that care deeply about each student. Gateway is a military-style school that includes several important 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 focus, to help teens realize the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens work through 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 Palm Harbor, 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!