Living with rebellious or difficult teens can be a major challenge to your parenting skills.
They can make your home a hot bed for disrespectful and abusive behavior. But when you feel like you can’t handle their abuse anymore, do you consider sending them off to a Brat Camp?

A brat camp is where a dose of tough love is administered to your out of control child. It usually consists of a military style treatment to straighten out difficult kids.

Physical and mental drills and exercises in these camps teach discipline. They retrain abusive kids and get them ready for re-integration into society and the home. Only this time they come out responsible and respectful.

Usually these boot camps for teens are located out in the wilderness or in other far off places like deserts. But there are also specialized boarding houses that administer the same kind of behavioral modification treatments.

This solution is rather extreme and is designed actually for kids who seem to be just BAD or have criminal tendencies.

It has been found that a large number of kids sent to brat camps, aside from having behavior issues, had other more serious problems like, alcohol or drug abuse, and malicious and violent tendencies.

These are pretty hardcore issues that are beyond parenting skills.

Of course, the argument can always be made that intervention should have been done a lot earlier in the teen’s life, so that the problem would not have worsened to such degree. But that would be another article.

If your child or teen just seems difficult to deal with and his behavior does not qualify as totally out of control, then maybe brat camp would be too extreme for him.

Brat camp should only be a last resort. It is reserved only for those kids for whom nothing else seems to work. Some sectors are even arguing against it saying it actually does more damage than good.

What this is leading to is the issue of some parents sending their difficult teens to brat camp because they over diagnose the problem; or worse – abscond on their duty to parent the child.

Some parents become so scared that their teen exhibits worrying behavior. They feel they don’t have the proper parenting skills to handle it; they panic and end up sending their kids to brat camp hoping the problem will go away.

The lack of skills to deal with difficult, rebellious or worrying behavior of teens should not be a reason for resorting to such extreme behavior change solutions. No one really knows how your child will come out of it.

What parents ought to do is try another kind of behavior change program that has been designed to equip them with the proper skills to deal with abusive kids. Parents should not and must not give up easily on their kids.

If you’re facing difficult behavior from your teen, learn how to handle and correct the problem with Total Transformation. This at-home behavior change program works on your skills to deal with issues of discipline at the comfort of your own home.