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Help For Parents
Overview
Parenting is full of difficult decisions, and there is no decision as hard as sending your child away, no matter how desperately he may need the help. It’s a decision that can traumatize the parents and the student.
Worse, this decision tends to come after a long and difficult time in your family’s life. You have likely been concerned about your son’s behavior, health and associations for months leading up to this decision. Promises have likely been made and broken. Opportunities may have been scorned. You’ve probably questioned and second-guessed everything you’ve ever done as a parent to the point of exhaustion.
White River Academy understands that sending a child away to school is a difficult. Which is why we’ve created this help section to make it easier for you to determine if we are the right choice for your son’s future. In this section, you’ll find information that will educate you about your son’s behavior and resources that can aid your search for solutions.
Our school is a residential treatment center for adolescent males between the ages of 12 and 17 with behavioral problems. We combine activities that build positive experiences, community service and individually-tailored learning along with our therapeutic programs. Our treatment utilizes a blend of positive peer culture treatment modality, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy to foster personal growth and help boys become the men they are meant to be.
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How to know your son needs help
It’s can be hard for us to remember once we’re a few decades removed from them, but our teen years are full of turmoil. It’s a time of uncertainty, a time when we get our first taste of the social structures that will govern us for the remainder of our lives, a time when we experience intimate and sometimes traumatic changes in ourselves.
It’s also our first taste of freedom and independence, which is why it’s common for teenagers to be defiant. This can make telling the difference between ordinary teenage behavior and more serious problems that require real intervention tricky. So we’ve developed a free assessment that can help you determine how severe your son’s difficulties are – as well as what type of solution your situation requires. In some cases, sending him to a residential treatment center such as White River Academy might be the best choice. This may seem like a drastic measure, but it may also help your son overcome his destructive behavioral patterns and reach his full potential.
To help you learn better ways to cope with your teen’s behavioral problems in the meantime, we have provided a series of tools and resources with guidance on most common difficulties.
What to do when your son struggles
Watching your child struggle instead of living up to their full potential is difficult. Confronting them isn’t much easier — parents often face more defiance, arguments and even threats. Left alone, these behaviors can destroy the parent-child relationship.
These severe cases often benefit from professional assistance. Skilled professionals can provide you with advice on the best way to manage your son’s behaviors. Outpatient psychotherapy is also useful. But for cases where inpatient therapy and treatment is necessary, a residential treatment center like White River Academy is the right solution.
We provide a safe, structured environment far away from bad habits, triggers and temptation, providing a structured environment where adolescents can learn to understand themselves and grow.
Healing your relationship
By coming to our site, you’ve already decided that you don’t want a turbulent or damaged relationship with your child. That’s good — no parent does! Even if you think that relationship has been destroyed, there’s still hope; most relationships can be healed. Despite our academy’s remote location, we make sure families play a central role in the treatment process.
Our family therapy sessions help heal broken relationships, and our quarterly family weekends allow families and students to reconnect by participating in fun activities together.
Finally, we hold a series of seminars during family weekends to further educate you on how to help your son. Relationships are fixed with time, care, love and support.
Is Residential Treatment right for your family?
Serious problems in adolescence often continue into adulthood; indeed, they often escalate. Working on those problems when they first manifest themselves in adolescence is important. Whether your son’s problems involve substance abuse, mental health issues, authority figures or his peers—a residential treatment center can help. Entering into a structured environment disrupts bad behavior patterns and can show an adolescent that there are other, better ways to deal with their problems.