Boot Camps in Upper Marlboro, Maryland Can Help Troubled Teens, if They Are Like Gateway Boys Academy

Are you looking into boot camps in or around Upper Marlboro, Maryland to deal with a rebellious teen? Read on to see 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 exhibits blatant disregard for authority, commonly displays oppositional behavior, gets into frequent and growing trouble with the law, and shows no cooperation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help reform your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in Upper Marlboro, Maryland Can Help Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Popular belief gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making badly behaved teens get back on the straight and narrow path. In truth, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps give a crash course in discipline, personal responsibility and regard for authority. Programs like these can send a powerful message to a teen who might otherwise ruin his life with crime. For the ones 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 destructive habits, to more respectable 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 situations, most adolescent issues are much more complex than they seem on the surface and are only the symptoms of other problems. Boot camps focus entirely on modifying behavior; they do not offer the therapeutic support to help teens resolve the true underlying issues. For teens showing anxiety, depression, drug or alcohol use, low 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 Upper Marlboro, Maryland fail to solve deeper issues 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 Upper Marlboro, Maryland 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 benefits of the military approach with the therapeutic component of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, located 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 more than 20 years. Struggling teenage boys from Upper Marlboro, Maryland and other places benefit from an accredited academic program, counseling and teaching, instruction in military drill and history, and the discipline for which boot camps are known. Gateway offers a  compassionate staff that cares deeply about each teen. Gateway is a military-style school that includes several essential 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 teaching and spiritual emphasis, 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 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 Upper Marlboro, Maryland, 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!