What Are Students at Therapeutic Schools Teaching Us?

It takes many professional therapeutic boarding schools, dedicated people to provide the necessary support needed to help students at therapeutic schools learn to help themselves. In establishing effective programs for this population, Canada all girls' therapeutic boarding schools must first learn new modalities that are required to reach out and provide the backdrop for sustained emotional growth. These students in Canada therapeutic school demand a perception on life other than their current one to make sense of the process of maturity. Chronologically and physiologically these students are in the process of becoming adults. It's the process of emotional maturity that demands a different kind of social assimilation of appropriate behaviour.

In Western culture, it's the job of adolescents to appropriately challenge the status quo and challenge social norms in their journey to become card-carrying adults who in turn, will help determine the status quo for next generations. Along the way, however, some therapeutic schools seem to be unable to remain within the realm of "appropriate challenge".

Many of these adolescents seem to lose their grounding and are drawn into a world of their peers, relying on one another to bolster and justify behaviours of defiance, use of illicit drugs, lying, stealing, cheating, promiscuity ... in short, a largely dedicated commitment to live openly in opposition to social norms. They reject their family and migrate to another form of family made up of like-minded peers. They see their own family merely as a resource to supplant basic life needs of food, shelter, and clothing and of course, money.

Why do only some adolescents fall into this matrix of socially unacceptable behaviours? Do these adolescents exhibit common personality traits? Do they follow common patterns of development? What are the tell-tale signs that a prepubescent child may be a candidate for such a journey? What drives the development of theses unwanted behaviours to the degree we see? What remedies are available to parents of such adolescents?

Answers to these questions are generally expected to come from psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and even anthropologists. Although there are many dedicated, brilliant and accomplished people working in these scientific fields, there seem to be few simple, integrated answers that cut across these various areas of study and expertise.

The Canadian child and adolescent psychiatric community, in conjunction with a national public health agency (HBSC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), has recently and collectively broadened its reach by asking for input from local community-based organizations across the country with first-line direct experience in working with children and adolescents whose behaviors fall outside social acceptance.

In concert with, but separate from the above initiative, members of our organization over much of 2009, Canada therapeutic girl schools were invited to audit weekly in-hospital seminars of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists at one of the world's leading children's hospitals. That rare insight for us demonstrated how deeply this issue is studied and how hard these professionals are working to find answers. Therapeutic schools work goes far beyond establishing diagnoses and relevant prescription drugs.

Over the past decade of forming and operating an all-girls therapeutic boarding high school, we have developed in a grass-roots manner, academic and emotional growth models that have proven to be highly effective in returning out-of-control adolescent girls back toward the acceptable standard of "appropriate challenge". We have had to learn from the students themselves what they unknowingly demanded. All girls therapeutic boarding schools developed discrete steps of effective programming by first looking for the commonalities in the students who came from all manner of backgrounds and family histories. Over the years, therapeutic girl school designed and offered a program that opens doors for students to take a motivated interest in their emotional growth, academic achievement and familial re-connection.