Boot Camps in Sterling, Virginia Can Help Troubled Teens, if They Are Like Gateway Boys Academy

Are you researching boot camps in or around Sterling, Virginia to deal with a rebellious teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and discover how Gateway’s program may be even more beneficial for your teen.

If your teen exhibits deliberate disregard for authority, forever displays rebellious behavior, gets into regular and escalating trouble with the law, and lacks cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help sort out your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Sterling, Virginia Can Help Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Public belief gives military schools, especially boot camps, a reputation for making wayward teens into respectable young citizens. In truth, there are several positive ways in which boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps offer an intensive focus on discipline, personal responsibility and respect for authority. Programs like these can send a wake-up call to a teen who might otherwise ruin his life with 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 respectable 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 are much more complex than they seem on the surface and are often only symptoms of other issues. Boot camps rely entirely on forcing compliance; they do not include the counseling or therapeutic input to help teens address the true underlying issues. For teens exhibiting 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 counterproductive instead, if it isn’t set up in a way that the discipline is coupled with Christian love and support.

Most boot camps in Sterling, Virginia fail to solve deeper issues but simply return a somewhat more compliant 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 Sterling, Virginia 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 an alternative that combines the strengths of the military approach with the therapeutic aspect of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has worked with thousands of struggling teenage boys and their families from homes all across the country for more than 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Sterling, Virginia and other cities receive an accredited academic program, counseling and instruction, instruction in military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are respected. Gateway offers a  compassionate staff that cares deeply about each teen. Gateway is a military-style school that features a number of critical 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 find the true source of lasting heart change.
• Counseling, to help teens address problems and replace 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 Sterling, Virginia, 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!