The premise behind these behavior programs is that the child is broken. I find it ironic that parents with the most to offer their children in the way of education, culture, and experience are being taken by these programs that in turn inflict deep, emotional injury to their children.
Maybe I'm too "lightweight" on this philosophical thread. But we need to recognize the reason that many (or most) of these kids are being sent to WWASPS is not because the parents really are out of options and think that the promises of glossy marketing will HELP their children. My experience (personal as well as talking with literally a hundred or more survivor kids) is that being sent away is: 1) a punishment for disrupting the parents' life, 2) to remove the kid from the parents' immediate environment, a "breather" for parents, so-to-speak, and - BIG REASON HERE - at the request/insistence of a new step-mother or step-father who has found a solution to having a new spouse without the "under-age baggage". There is a disportionate number of kids coming from newly-remarried homes...not just divorced homes, but *recently* remarried homes. I have been told that 20% of the kids are adopted (I think this was in Tranquility Bay Jay Kay's statements to the London Guardian). Hmmm...adoptions don't usually come with money-back guarantees, but WWASPS will offer to "fine tune" that cute little bundle you bought in Korea or Guatemala or Russia, and who unfortunately turned out to be a normal American teenager.
There will be a howling from WWASPS parents in response to such an idea, but then they have a pressing desperate need for validation for what they've done..."for his own good" because otherwise "the kid would be dead or in jail". This is reinforced in the cult behavior of the support groups, lock-step thinking with no allowance for "out of the box" ideas, secret language, secret seminars, secret code words to hide from the rest of the world that one has given over total control of a child...communication, discipline, intellect and independent thought..to people with no ability except their own proclamations and the passionate promotion by parents with a similar need for validation.
These places are not boarding schools (a somewhat posh idea that plays well with the folks back home). No parent will tell the left-behind friends, neighbors, clergy, teachers, or even law enforcement that they shipped their kids off with carte blanche to a group without credentials who promise to return a "fixed kid" if given enough time and money, if only parents allow the kid to be apart from the rest of the world as long as the cashier says it is necessary.
So much information is available on the Internet about WWASPS...mostly negative, from forums like this, to the record of facilities' forced closures, to requests for Congressional investigation, to really weird and parrot-like forum ravings from WWASPS parents about benefits. What on earth would persuade a parent to ignore all this information, and send their kid off to a Stranger With a Bad Reputation? As Anon said eloquently...when your group thinks it's OK, but the rest of the world says it's not, how can you ignore that? I've heard several times about parents setting up a code word with their kid, so that kid can pass it back to the parent if things are really bad. Jesus!!!! Why send him if you think it's that bad? The only reason I can imagine is...well, see #1, #2, and #3 above.
