Boot Camps in West Columbia, South Carolina Can Help Troubled Teens, if They Are Like Gateway Boys Academy

Are you researching boot camps near West Columbia, South Carolina to try to help a defiant teen? Learn how boot camps can help troubled teens and consider how Gateway’s program may be even more beneficial for your teen.

If your teen demonstrates unashamed disregard for authority, constantly displays defiant behavior, gets into regular and growing trouble with the law, and lacks motivation in school, perhaps a boot camp can help improve your troubled teen. 

Boot Camps in West Columbia, South Carolina Can Help At-Risk Boys Learn to Respect Authority

Popular belief gives military academies, especially boot camps, a reputation for making rebellious teens put their lives in order. In truth, in several positive ways, boot camps can help troubled teens. Boot camps provide a crash course in discipline, personal integrity and respect 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 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 self-defeating 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

Although boot camps can help troubled teens in some cases, most teenage issues are much more complex than they seem on the surface and are only the symptoms of other emotional problems. Boot camps focus entirely on behavior modification; they do not offer the counseling or therapeutic input to help teens deal with the true root issues. For teens exhibiting anxiety, depression, drug use, poor self-esteem, emotional disorders, and in fact most forms of rebellious behavior, the strict discipline of the 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 West Columbia, South Carolina on their own will not address family problems 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 Columbia, South Carolina 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 benefits of the military style with the therapeutic component of a therapeutic boarding school. Gateway, found in the Panhandle of Florida, is a Christian program that has helped thousands of struggling teenage boys and their families from places all across the country for well over 20 years. Troubled teenage boys from West Columbia, South Carolina and other places receive an accredited education, counseling and instruction, instruction in 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 important 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 realize the true source of lasting heart change.
• Mentoring, to help teens deal with issues and replace destructive patterns with healthy new habits.
• 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 Columbia, South Carolina, 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!