Treatment Options For Troubled Teens By M. Adams

The world is full of treatment options for teens that are having trouble. Some people want to blame everything on parenting while others say that nothing could have been done differently. The bottom line is that troubled teens are hard to deal with. If you have a teen that's struggling, chances are high that you could use some help.

Before you decide what type of treatment you're going to use, make sure to evaluate the problems that your teen is having. For example, if your teen is struggling with drug abuse you will want to consider a treatment that will help them with the drug problem and some treatment facilities won't be ready for this type of issue.

There are treatment centers that specifically help teens to overcome addictions and in this case you would want to use one of those. Drug rehabilitation isn't something to take lightly, but is sometimes the only choice.

On the other hand, you may have a teen that doesn't have that level of problem, but struggles in other areas. For example, your teen may struggle with behavior. They may have an anger problem or they may think that the world owes them everything. In these cases teens can become very unbalanced and that is something that is very difficult for families to deal with.

The goal of any treatment option should be to fix the imbalances that cause your teen to behave improperly. This can often be achieved through the help and support of a boarding school for troubled teens, a military school, or a religious program. Most teens are of course very resistant to getting started in this type of program, because they don't want your help. However, many have a change of heart during the treatment and this is obviously the goal.

If you feel like you're in over your head, you might want to consider a boarding school for troubled teens Sometimes other can touch your teen and inspire change in ways that you can't. You may also want to consider military schools for boys as a viable option.

What Kids Are Up to on the Internet is Your Business! By Matthew T Payne

The computer has become as central to the American household as the television. If my wife and I pose a question to which neither of us can answer, my children chime in to go and check on Google. Unlike the row of Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedias that held the many answers that I asked for as a child, our children can search for the big picture questions right down to tomorrow's weather in less time than it took me to get a stool to take down a single volume off the shelf. Progress is simply amazing!

Yet with that ease and simplicity of use that the internet has brought our children, so to has it become easier for others to take advantage and exploit our children's innocence. When my son followed banners away from Hotwheels to the video game site, he just kept looking for cool and interesting pictures. A scary thought! Now we have new rules that if you leave a web page, you have to tell mommy and daddy. This obviously won't last forever. As soon as this process becomes cumbersome for wither of us, it will be obsolete. Even though it will be cumbersome, it will not relieve me of my duty as a responsible parent to monitor and protect my children from the dangers of the world wide web.

Although some may say that the statistics present an improbable threat to any individual persons child, I cannot justify any number small enough not to take measures to protect my child. We are given the enormous and sometimes overwhelming responsibility of protecting and ensuring the best possible quality of life for our children. As certain as we would not put an adult movie in the DVD player for our children to watch, we should not plead ignorance to the exploits available to all internet users. Parental monitoring of internet traffic is simply a new tool to add to your bag of tricks.

You are not spying on your kids! Spying implies subversive tactics to acquire information unknown to the person you are watching. This doesn't have to be the case. Let everyone in the family know that you are monitoring all internet activities. Let your children know why you monitoring the web. Depending on the ages of your children, the response will be drastically different. Some kids will be surprised that you are not already monitoring them. Others will throw the book at you pleading invasion of privacy. Either reaction should not raise alarm for the parent. For both scenarios, it is the responsibility of the parent to let the child know exactly why monitoring is necessary and the limitations that the parent wishes to place on the monitoring. The parent should invite this event as a perfect opportunity to open the lines of communication. Reassure your child that you are monitoring them for their own safety. Establish rules that enable mutual trust. If you begin to nit-pick every conversation your child is having with their friends rather than taking the big picture approach, you may encourage a distrustful relationship with your child.

Even if you want to be your child's best friend, monitoring their internet activity is simply a new responsibility added to parenting today. Their right to privacy is superseded by your right to ensure your child's safety. Take the opportunity to be more in touch with your child's life. The reality is that you don't want to know all the details, but you want to be able to catch the dangers and pitfalls of social networking on the internet. You want to be able to give your child freedoms without having to worry about them getting taken advantage of. You want them to learn the small lessons of life, not the harsh and sometimes cruel realities. That is why knowing what your kids are up to IS YOUR BUSINESS!

For additional information of monitoring your childs activity on the internet, as well as software recommendations, check out Monitoring Your Child's Internet Activity, provided on my lens.

Preschool Windsock Activity By Rachel Paxton

Children love windsocks. They are fun to make and fun to hang and look at. This preschool activity is very easy and is suited to any season or holiday. To make a windsock you will need:

Construction paper
Crayons or markers
Small pictures
Yarn
Glue
Stapler
Scissors
Streamers

For the top of the windsock you will need one 8 1/2 x 11 piece of construction paper. Cut the piece of paper in half lengthwise.

Next have your child color the small pictures to place on the windsock. Coloring and activity books are great for finding pictures. You can use a copier to reduce or enlarge the pictures to fit on the windsock. We cut out four pictures for each of our windsocks.

After coloring the pictures, cut them out and glue them to the two pieces of construction paper. Next lay the pieces of paper end to end and staple them together. Bring the two open ends of the paper together to form a circle and staple the two ends together. This is the top of the windsock.

Next have your child cut the streamers. These streamers are the same kind of streamers you would hang up for a birthday party. Cut approximately six pieces of streamer to be 18 inches each. Have your child glue the ends of the streamers inside the bottom of the windsock so that they are hanging out of the bottom of the windsock.

Have your child cut a piece of yarn approximately 18 inches long. Staple the ends of the yarn on each side of the top of the windsock. Your windsock is ready to hang!

These windsocks are very easy to make and look really cute hanging out on your patio. You can also hang them in your house. They are great seasonal and holiday projects. You can change the pictures and colors of the windsocks with the seasons, such as for Easter, Christmas, or Halloween. You could have flowers for spring, bumblebees for summer, or leaves for fall. The possibilities are limitless. My boys are currently interested in insects, so they colored some bugs for their windsocks.

This activity is a great opportunity for your preschooler to practice coloring, cutting, and gluing. If your preschooler doesn't yet have a long attention span, you might want to pre-cut some of the pieces ahead of time, like the top of the windsock and the streamers. My busy boys barely made it past the coloring part, but loved seeing their windsocks blowing in the breeze!

Rachel Paxton is a freelance writer and mom of five. For resources for the Christian family, including parenting, toddler and preschool activities, homeschooling, family traditions, and more, visit http://www.Christian-Parent.com

Why Bootcamps Don't Provide Optimal Help For Troubled Teens By Brad Yomen

Bootcamps operate from a fairly traditional model of behavior modification. The programs are structured on a reward/punishment system. They hope to mold teen's behaviors by creating consequences-good and bad-for various forms of behavior.

These programs are very rules-oriented participants are expected to abide by those rules and a failure to do so usually results in a swift and clearly visible result. There are two reasons why these approaches aren't the optimal method of providing help for troubled teens.

First, participants will often change their behaviors and actions within the program for the sake of "getting by" without really making any meaningful alteration in their perspective. Bootcamps become systems for troubled teens to "game". They know the programs are temporary and they can make superficial changes in behavior in order to get through the program.

When the kids return home, however, they frequently revert to previous patterns. The "changes" experienced in the program environment weren't really changes at all. They were merely temporary adjustments.

Second, the artificial structure of rewards and punishments doesn't help to address the underlying causes of the behavior problems that led to bootcamp enrollment in the first place. Behavior modification programs emphasize the outward behavioral changes but often fail to deal with core issues.

Once the artificial construct of rewards and punishments within the controlled environment of the program "game" is removed, the teen no longer feels a reason to continue playing. Those apparent shifts in behavior are revealed to be nothing more than temporary adjustments that were more about convenience and system manipulation than genuine change.

Real change, of course, comes from successfully tackling those root causes. When they're ignored, you can feel relatively confident that problems will resurface again and again. Bootcamps look like a serious, quick solution. That's one reason why they get a great deal of media attention. However, they are not the best way to provide meaningful help for troubled teens.

Interested in hope for troubled teens? Visit Hope4Teens.org to learn more about a Christ-based method to help troubled teens make real, lasting, and remarkably positive life changes:

http://hope4teens.org/

Struggling Teens Need More Than Behavior Modification By Brad Yomen

We have a tendency to look for the simplest solutions when we confront problems. Nowhere is this proclivity more pronounced than in the area of providing support and assistance to troubled teenagers. We frequently reach out to struggling teens with behavior modification programs, hoping for a quick behavioral fix. Unfortunately, that may not be the best solution.

Behavior modifications operate from an attractively simple premise. If you construct a set of rules that allows for punishments and/or rewards based on the behavior of the participant, that person will adjust to maximize his or her level of comfort. In other words, the participant will change his or her behavior in order to get more rewards and to avoid uncomfortable punishment.

This is the root thinking behind many troubled teen bootcamps and other programs targeting at-risk youth. The Pavlovian thinking at the base of these behavior modification programs hopes that simple retraining based on rewards and punishment will result in a transformative experience that will put the child on the "right track".

These methods do inspire changes. However, they're usually less than genuine and they tend to lack staying power. The artificial punishment/reward construct encourages the teenager to learn the rules of the game and to act accordingly. He or she may alter outward behavior to comport with program expectations. Underneath those superficial alterations, however, nothing significant is happening.

Even the most troubled kids can learn a game and how to play it. When that short game (the program) ends, however, they are likely to quickly revert to old habits and ways of thinking. That's because the the simple behavior modification approach often fails to address the significant root causes of inappropriate behavior. There's no focus on the person, attention is only temporarily directed toward how that person is acting.

Struggling teens can get some benefit from behavior modification-based programs. However, the only way to truly encourage meaningful change is to break away from simplistic outlooks and to pay attention to deeper core issues.

It would be nice if there was a simple solution to "fixing" troubled teenagers. Unfortunately, the most simple perspectives don't accomplish their goals. It's important to address both superficial behaviors and the human being on a deeper level.

Interested in struggling teens and how to get them moving in the right direction? Visit Hope4Teens.org to learn more about a Christ-based method to help troubled teens make real, lasting, and remarkably positive life changes:

http://hope4teens.org/