Teen Boarding School Help

Teen boot camps were intervention methods created in the early 1970s, when the U.S. Juvenile Justice System needed a system that will provide juvenile delinquents an alternative to jail. Boosted by the importance of discipline as a primary method of managing children and teens, and the appeal of the U.S. military training camps had with government officials and the public in general, these systems crossed over to the private sector where they became popular intervention solution for rehabilitating troubled teenagers and at risk youth.

Lately however, concerns have been raised over boot camps’ purported effectiveness in treating troubled teens. It seems, according to a number of experts, that these military style rehabilitation camps were never effective in its role as intervention as what was originally assumed. According to them, these programs should be abandoned in favor of better methods, such as CBT in therapeutic boarding schools.

Boot camps has poor evidence in long term effectiveness

According to Dr. Doris MacKenzie and her team of researchers who spent more than a decade in studying the effects of teen boot camps, she said that these camps and its similar style programs lack the necessary components of effective therapy; hence it has time and again shown not effective in reducing the recidivism rates of its participants. Recidivism, in psychiatry, is the rate of decrease in the tendency of troubled teenagers to fall back into their negative behavior. For an intervention to be successful, MacKenzie stated that not only there should be immediate positive change, this change must be carried into the future as well.

According to MacKenzie, a three to six months rehabilitation time of a typical teen boot camp, if it works at all, is very insufficient to change a teen that had a lifetime of bad behavior. Even typical therapeutic residential treatment centers know the importance of aftercare programs in an intervention setting. Without it, teens will just relapse into bad habits and this time, with added bitterness to their family who had sent them to a boot camp in the first place.

Graph showing poor recidivism rates of boot camp participants
According to NIJ, boot camp participants fare no better than
teens in juvenile jail

Therapeutic boarding school should be used for problem children

Modern intervention techniques have been specifically developed to address the deep seated psychological and emotional problems of troubled teenagers. With the development of cognitive therapy in the 1960s, its offshoot the cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT, swiftly became a popular intervention technique for therapists and psychiatrists after numerous studies showed that it is effective in treating a wide array of psychological and emotional problems. In 1998, leading researchers Kaslow and Thompson compiled a report showing how evidence based psychosocial treatments can have especially favorable effect compared to other classical approaches. Most importantly, the report proved that CBT therapy is the most effective method in reducing the recidivism rates of participating teens, including those suffering from major psychological and emotional disorders such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, etc.

Therapeutic boarding schools, who are the primary users of the CBT method, should be used in treating troubled teens. Many therapeutic boarding schools employ cognitive behavior therapy in junction with known clinical treatment methods and these schools have better track in producing good results, as opposed to the vague results produced by boot camps.

Similar to when searching for a good boarding school, parents looking for a good choice should first look if these aspects are present: an accredited school or an accredited program, certified and qualified staff with certified and qualified clinical team, a good overall feedback from parents regarding the school, and feedback whether the staff show care and empathy on their students.