How to Save Your Troubled Teen

This Article is meant to provide parents of troubled teens a resource based upon my individual experience. The ideas here worked for my son but they will not necessarily work for everyone. I am sharing this because we felt that all hope was lost. But all hope was not lost for us and is not lost for you. Read on.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• An open mind and perserverence.

1. Evaluate where you and your child are in the "System." Our son's school classified him as "Special Ed" from when he was 9 years old providing him with extra help and assitance until he hit high school where they told us that he could not be "Mainstreamed" anymore because he would be too disruptive to the class. His disability is classic ADHD and a mild tic disorder which are both controlled with medication. His real problem, which we discovered after the fact, is that his IQ is only 4 points short of genius and he easily loses his focus in the regular public school environment. He also had a need to be accepted (what kid doesn't?) and he would do things inappropariately to shock others into liking him.
2. Challenge their findings. When our son was not permitted to go into mainstream high school they bussed him to another school district that had smaller focused classes for what we were told were "kids like him" but which isolated him from other kids. The kids that attended the program with him were severe disability cases. In a 3 month period we went from holding it all together to watching him fall off of a cliff. He was using drugs, drinking, sneaking out of his mother's house in the middle of the night and was suspended from school twice (once for skipping and once for getting into an altercation with another student). After 3.5 months, this 15 year old decided that he was no longer going to go to school. The school, without any input from his therapist of 5 years, decided to place him in an outpatient institutional hospital school. We refused to put him in that place.
3. Search for alternatives. Luckily for us, my son's therapist disagreed with the schools assessment and found a school for us in Massechussets called the Academy at Swift River ("ASR"). ASR is a very structured school environment that specializes in troubled teens in a therapuetic family style environement. This not a bootcamp. We researched other schools and actually visited 3 or 4 of them and found that ASR was the best alternative. But, after talking to the ASR school administrators and discussing our son's situation, they advised us that they could not take him until after he completed a wilderness program. They recommended one of their affiliated programs called Adirondack Leadership Expeditions ("ALE"). ALE is a survival wilderness program designed to strip your child of all of the "comforts" of home; they put the kids in groups of a max of 8 with a therapist and 2-3 wilderness counselors and are provided with everything they need as basic provisions. Throughout the 28-60 day program they work with your child and you (through telephone contact with the therapist and letters to and from your child) to give your child an understanding at a basic level of why you took these measures and how the program will assist him/her. The initial problem: how does one get the child to go? They will help you facilitate transportation with experienced individuals. Our son is a very big young man and he went willingly after just a 5-10 minute conversation with us and the transporters.
4. Follow Through. Some people think that the wilderness program is enough (and your child will try to convince you fo this). Wilderness is not enough!! Every parent with whom I have made contact with that brought a troubled teen home directly after completing the wilderness program was sorry for doing so. Kids are resilient at gettign through the tough times so that they can ease back into their lifestyle. they will tell you lies about how "I learned my lesson. I have changed. Can we go home now?" Don't take the bait. Follow through with the gameplan and get him/her into a new school environment. Without more, once he/she gets back to his/her "friends" (using that term lightly) there is no question that he/she will fall right back into old patterns.
5. Go with the flow. Sometimes it might be very diffiuclt to come to the realization that intervention is necessary and that you actually played an integral part in where you child wound up. In our situation, my son is a product of a divorced family (very common trait for these kids) where my style (overly structured and over emphasis on education) and his mother's style (very liberal and without consequences) clashed oftentimes permitting him to play us off against one another. If you have this situation I cannot emphasize enough the necessity that the both of you be on the same page; it cannot work until you get there. Not to fret though, for the most part you are not the main problem but you will play an importnat part in getting back your kid. These schools have wonderful therapuetic programs that involve the entire family; they involve positive reinforcement of good character traits and consequences for not following the rules. Negative behavior is given consequences such as work study or self study challenges as well as loss of priviledges Positive behavior and schoolwork is rewarded by moving up the levels and getting additional priviledges. Level 1 is basic; you get a 10 minute per week telephone call to your parents. Level 2 permits 15 minute calls and on campus visits. Level 3 permits 20 minute calls and off campus hotel visits. Level 4 permits 30 minute calls and your child has then reached a level of trust and accomplishment where he/she can go home for visits. Throughout the entire process you are kept informed by email and by a weekly telephone call from your child's counselor. Our son left us in 1/07 having failed all of his 9th grade classes from 9/06 - 1/07 in the public school system. He will be graduating ASR having completed 10th grade in just 16 months (they have school throughout the entire year). He is honest, respectful and finally "gets it." We are so grateful that we were able to find this opportunity and save our son. Don't let your child be a victim of the system and become another statistic. Take action. Challenge the school's conclusions and get your own child's therapist invovled to challenge their conclusions.
6. So, how does one pay for all of this? We were a bit lucky and I was able to fight, yes fight, the school district and get them to agree to pick up 1/2 the cost. Had I known what I know now when this all started I could have successfully fought them to pay for the entire program. The thing that you have working for you is time. The school systems do not make timely decisions; they had to go through recommendning all of the least restrictive steps first before they finally agreed with our conclusion, based upon our therapist's recommendation (how could they fight it? he was workign with our son for 5 years!) that he needed a residential placment in a structured school environment; not a classic Special Ed environment. So, when you decide to take a look at this you should immediately hire or at least talk to an Education lawyer in your area. Ours was outstanding and I only wish that I hired her before we took the first step and sent our son to the wilderness program at ALE. The steps that need to be taken can be very tricky and will differ from state to state. It is important to follow your state's requirements to the letter. If I had taken one step prior to removing our son from their system I probabaly would have been able to force the school district to pay for the whole thing. But, that's ok. Even if they didn't have to pay anything I still would have sent my son there. As one parent of a child at ASR said to me when I went to one of their family meetings "If your kid had cancer you would pay whatever it takes to cut it out. This is just like a cancer. It is killing my child and I will pay whatever it takes to get rid of it." Don't wait until the cancer kills your teeenager. Save him/her now. I have my son back and we are once again best friends.

Tips & Warnings

• Get an education lawyer first and follow your State's laws for challenging their systematic placement to give yourself the best opportunity to force them to pay for the right school. Get your kid the help even if you have to pay for it yourself. You can make more money but you can't reverse a jail sentence or death.
• The information provided in this article portrays a solution to my child's problem. You may have the same results if you go down this path or something similar. The program does not work for everyone and it is not suited for kids that have a history of violence.