Thursday, May 15, 2008
Teens are getting the blame for their parents' failures.
Aug 30, 2000 | This summer, while their pals slept until noon, chilled at the beach or flipped burgers for extra cash, a growing number of teenagers were forcefully removed from their homes by "escorts," flown several hundred miles away or, in some cases, overseas to be enrolled in "emotional growth boarding schools" or "wilderness therapy programs" for "defiant teens." They are lost, troubled, self-destructive and underachieving, according to ads for teen "turnaround" programs, part of a bumper crop of particularly out-of-control teens who roam America's cities and suburbs, tottering on the brink of an uncertain future.
Think Columbine. Think pot. Think mouthing off, broken curfews, lousy grades, pierced tongues.
Then think again.
Are we in the grips of a teen crisis, a developmental emergency that requires expensive intervention? Not exactly, say experts in adolescent psychology. Statistics show that teenagers aren't really acting up or out more than they have in the past. Instead we are more likely in a crisis of parenthood that has created a lucrative new market for specialty schools and educational consultants. If there is a serious problem here, it may be one of parenting and perception, not bad kids.
"There is no evidence that risk taking among teens is any worse today, quite the contrary," says Lynn Ponton, M.D., professor of adolescent psychology and author of "Romance of Risk" and "The Sex Lives of Teenagers." "But there is a shift among parents. Baby boomer parents look at their own past risk taking, exaggerate it and project it onto their kids.
"There's also a mistaken notion that peers create high-risk behavior," adds Ponton. "In fact it's parenting that creates high-risk behavior, and there are many studies to prove this. Some kids are seriously dysfunctional and some of these schools quite good. But what frequently happens is that kids are shipped off to these schools, come back better, but the parents are still pathological."
Indeed, current statistics about teenage behavior reflect that American adolescents are much more wholesome than the rest of us give them credit for. Teen violence is down and test scores -- for both genders -- are up. In recent reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that the teenage birth rate is at its lowest level in 60 years and that smoking among high school students has declined as well.
Nonetheless, a proliferation of dread-laden questions leaps out from school directory advertisements ("Troubled teen?" "Angry, defiant teen?" "Out of control?" "Self-destructive?" Low self-esteem?" "Underachiever?"), heralding an epidemic of insecurity among parents and an attendant boom in specialty schools. (A recent Sunset magazine had no fewer than 25 ads for specialty schools in its directory, once rife with weight loss camps and military academies.)
In this busy menagerie there are two distinct animals: emotional growth boarding schools and therapeutic wilderness programs. Therapeutic wilderness programs are short-term (usually six to eight weeks) expeditions that take kids into the wild and offer a blend of intensive counseling, discipline and coming to terms with Mother Nature in all her Spartan, unforgiving glory. Emotional growth boarding schools are the alternative to intensive therapy in the fir trees -- private facilities offering (expensive) long-term therapy to stubbornly troubled teens.
Despite serious setbacks caused by the deaths of several young attendees several years ago, wilderness experience programs are growing. Of the estimated 500 such programs operating today, roughly 40 are therapy based, generating an average gross revenue of $143 million.
An official figure for the number of emotional growth boarding schools is hard to come by. However, for the past three years, Lon Woodbury -- an educational consultant whose Web site and various publications have become a clearinghouse for the industry -- has been circulating a survey among independent educational consultants. This spring, his list contained approximately 250 emotional growth schools, of which Woodbury included 89 in his directory (a personal "best-of" assessment based on "reputation for safety and effectiveness"). In 1998 these 89 schools represented $341 million in revenue. (In 1993, Woodbury's directory contained only 31 such schools.) Had Woodbury included the total of 250 in his study, the annual revenue of specialty schools for 1998 would jump to $1 billion.
As lucrative as it has been for specialty schools, the perception that teen defiance is on the rise is less a matter of cultural disaster than a fluke of population. There are more teenagers alive today than ever before -- approximately 30 million of them at the moment -- and their numbers are expected to hit 40 million by 2008. With more teenagers out there -- plus overcrowded schools, fewer treatment centers as a result of budget cuts and highly publicized white teen crime -- there is the erroneous perception that pathologically bad teen behavior is increasing. The reality is that there are simply more teenagers and thus more bad apples falling from the tree.
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