Boot Camps in West Chester, Pennsylvania Can Help Troubled Teens, if They Are Like Gateway Boys Academy

Are you looking into boot camps near West Chester, Pennsylvania to deal with a rebellious teen? Find out how boot camps can help troubled teens and discover how Gateway’s program may prove even more successful for your teen.

If your teen shows deliberate disregard for authority, constantly displays oppositional 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 West Chester, Pennsylvania Can Help Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Popular belief gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making errant teens put their lives in order. In fact, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps provide an intensive focus on discipline, personal integrity and regard for authority. Programs like these can send a powerful message to a teen who might otherwise ruin his life with crime. For those who are shaped by 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 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 may only be symptoms of other problems. Boot camps rely entirely on modifying behavior; they do not offer the therapeutic support to help teens resolve the true root issues. For teens with anxiety, depression, drug use, low self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most instances 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 West Chester, Pennsylvania on their own will not deal with family communication 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 West Chester, Pennsylvania 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 strengths of the military approach with the therapeutic aspect of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, located in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has served thousands of struggling teenage boys and their families from places all across the country for more than 20 years. Troubled teenage boys from West Chester, Pennsylvania 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 renowned. Gateway offers staff that care deeply about each student. Gateway is a military-style school that features several critical components that are typically absent 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 focus, to help teens discover the true source of lasting heart change.
• Counseling, to help teens work through issues 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 West Chester, Pennsylvania, 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!