Therapeutic and Emotional Growth Placements
Adolescents face an array of developmental tasks - physical, emotional, intellectual, social - that can be daunting. Most teens negotiate these tasks with minimal disruption, while others need extra support. Adolescents may experience depression, anxiety, identity confusion, difficulty forming healthy relationships. They may struggle with new or continued academic frustration when school expectations change. Adopted teens, and those facing a family divorce or death, may face grief and additional uncertainty about identity.
As any parent of a teen knows, the expression of these emotional or academic challenges is not necessarily direct. Rather, it can take the form of anger, withdrawal, defiance, school refusal or failure, disturbances in eating, abuse of alcohol or other drugs, overuse of computer games or the internet, or inappropriate sexual activity.
For many struggling teens and their families, community resources such as school counselors and teachers, extended family members, faith-based youth groups, and individual or group psychotherapists provide adequate support. Other families find that a daughter or son is best helped in a setting with a more structured approach to guiding teens through the challenges of development. These settings may include residential treatment centers, therapeutic boarding schools, and emotional growth schools. Such schools offer clear and consistent structure, group and individual therapy, appropriate academics, and physical activity to promote emotional health and responsibility. Educational and mental health professionals on staff encourage and teach students to become more accountable for their actions, more trustworthy, and better able to cope with life's inevitable challenges and disappointments. These programs do not claim to "fix" a child who by implication is broken. Rather, they strive to guide both teen and family through a process of emotional and cognitive growth, strengthening the base upon which healthy relationships - and ultimately, satisfying lives - are built.
These longer-term placements may be preceded by a wilderness experience. (This is not "boot camp"!) In a wilderness program, a student functions 24 hours a day with a small group of fellow campers, professional therapists, and field staff. There, in an outdoor environment free from the pressure and distractions of popular culture, adolescents are encouraged to evaluate their lives to date, develop insights about the impact of their behaviors, and start to build an accurate sense of their own capabilities - which often they have grossly underestimated. They begin a journey toward emotional health and maturity that can continue in a subsequent placement.
