[ on tranqulility bay and abusive boot camps ]

This is an interesting thread as it touches many doper’s right where they live on a variety of different levels as both parents and children, past and present.

It is evident to me that many of the posters going through the "anything but boot camp" arguments, even those who deal with behavioral problems professionally, have never been grill to grill, day in and day out, with a truly, dangerously out of control of control teenager as an on site parent in the middle of the whirlwind that is destroying their family.

The question at this point, where conventional discipline and behavioral control strategies have lost traction, is obviously "What are you going to do?” While Tranquility Bay specifically may not best the best solution, there are real world situations where therapy, talking it out, grounding and double secret probation and the host of other non-physically coercive strategies are simply not going to work.

My social cohort is mostly middle and middle-upper class professionals. I have personally observed several "out of control teen" scenarios in these households of varying degrees but most involve an admixture of drugs, theft, serious property damage, some violence and an absolute cast iron determination on the part of the teen that "I will do what I want, when I want and no one is gonna be the boss of me or had better get in my way", and this is generally after thousands and thousands of therapy dollars.

Now... in about half these situations the parents inter-personal cluelessness and abject lack of parenting skills or inclination to enforce discipline fairly and effectively are mostly to blame for the bad behavior, and I'd like to send these idiot parents off to boot camp myself in those scenarios because the kids in these situations might be turned around with intelligent parenting. In the other half of the “out of control kid “scenarios the child, despite the best efforts of concerned parents is seemingly, for lack a of better description, an incipient sociopath and is simply determined that nothing matters more than their immediate desires and directly or subversively and will stop at almost nothing to achieve these ends.

Until you have a child and a situation like this, and quite frankly very few posters in this thread have given any indication that they have even the slightest real world grasp of the realities of dealing with a person like this, do not be quick to judge the parent who tries to save their child by sending them to a boot camp. Of the children sent to boot camp(s) I am familiar with 3 out of 5 returned substantially better adjusted, it had little effect on the 4th, and the 5th was suffering from organic mental problems that could not be effectively addressed by behavior mod therapies.

Boot camps are obviously not the answer for everyone, but for some dangerous and critical situations, if parents have the means to do so, it's better than the alternative of letting the streets and the legal system matriculate their kids into a behaviorially dysfunctional adulthood.