Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > The Troubled Teen Industry

Positive Impact??

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Janet:
Anxious Father, are you paying for your son's attendance at Positive Impact?  If so, why does he need to work for his room and board?  

If your son wants to leave when he is 18, what are his plans?  When he makes that decision, he will need to figure out where he will live and eat.  If he choses your home, he will need to follow your rules, (reasonable rules like no drugs or alcohol in your home, doing chores to help the family, going to school and/or work, etc.)  If he cannot do that then he will need to find somewhere else to live.  

I had troublesome teens who had to make these decisions.  When they needed to come home to save money to be able to move out again, they followed the rules and even made a few on their own so that they could save money faster.  One still has some serious problems and drugs was not part of it.  The other had to come to terms with his attitude about drugs and alcohol.  Today he is a very responsible adult family man.  Yes, he can fall off the wagon and he knows it.  Still, he managed to become the man he is without being sent to a behavior modification facility/school/prison.  Do all teens with attitude and drug problems find a successful end?  Probably not, but behavior modifications programs are not the answer.  BMP success are the ones who were like my now responsible son.  These teenagers are going to change no matter what.  Ask Ginger.  She has it right.  They are going to do drugs or whatever until it is no longer fun.  Then they become grownups all by themselves.

Good luck with your son.  Hopefully all he needs is life on his own with a humdrum job and cooking his own meals in a shared apartment.  Letting him go off on his own does not mean you don't have him over for dinner occasionally.  You remember him on holidays and his birthday with presents and consider him part of the family.  In other words you don't disown him!
I believe WWASPS do recommend disowning a child who does not follow the program rules.  I do not know is Positive Impact recommends disowning a child. You need to talk with  your son face to face to find out just how realistic he is. Then tell him your reasonable rules.   Again, good luck.

Anonymous:
Thanks Janet, that was very good advice you gave the anxious father.  The last thing in the world these program kids need is to be threatened with abandonment once they turn 18 and have the right to decide for themselves whether they want to remain "submerged in a controlled environment" or return home and pick up their lives as best they can.

This father sounds like he understands there is no pot of gold at the end of these programs. That most kids "fake it" until they "make it".  That the real parenting work begins the day their now-adult-size child comes home.

Hopefully, all the positive things this boy got out of his experience will not be lost on facing a potentially uncertain future without the love and support of his family.  All programs that allow this to happen are guilty of the worst kind manipulation and should be held accountable for essentially using these kids as a pawn to persuade parents that to keep "working the program" (and of course, signing those checks!).

In any case, Janet raises some good points AND has offered viable solutions which for the sake of this young man, I hope will be seriously considered by his family.

Good Luck to All!

 :smile:

Anonymous:

--- Quote ---On 2004-04-28 17:48:00, cherish wisdom wrote:

"by Sandra Kidd, Educational Consultant

June, 1999

Austin, Texas

512-338-1272



A beautiful beachfront Mexican villa located on the Sea of Cortez in a quaint fishing village and American retirement community called Bahia de Kino is the location for Positive Impact, a new residential specialty program for adolescent boys between the ages of 12 to 18. Here the boys work and live as a ?community of family? while learning new cognitive thinking and positive behavioral patterns through mentoring and leadership development. The average length of stay is from six to eighteen months and thanks to the Mexican economy the program is more affordable to some parents.



A profile of an appropriate candidate is a boy who has one or more of the following situations: a sense of adventure though often misguided and overly risky, substance abuse, a belief that parents and other authority figures are dispensable, suffers from loss of a Father-figure or needs male mentoring, needs life skill development, has a sense of entitlement, underachieves in school, is unable to make positive choices, or is involved in a negative peer subculture. The directors of the program believe that removing the boys from their natural, familiar environments forces them to have an ?imbalance,? and their exposure to a new, foreign culture makes them receptive to change and reflection, which then ?creates balance? within their lives.



A team of professionals called life coaches guides this process. Even though Positive Impact is a new program, the professionals who are involved in the program each have many years of experience working with troubled youth. They clearly know how to facilitate changes in attitudes and behaviors. This team includes J. John Anderson, M.S., Executive Director, Keith A. Breiland, M.D., Medical Director, Michael Cumming, M.S., Program Director, and Craig Rogers, Residential Living Coordinator.



I observed a GGI (Guided Group Interaction) that was led by Mike and Craig and was impressed with the genuine interest and concern they had for the boys in counseling them. They were good at recognizing destructive thinking and behavior that had become patterns for them, and helping them restructure their approach to positive, solution-focused living and coping skills. This process of counseling is called ?Positive Peer Environment.? It teaches the boys how to: identify problems, accept responsibility for their actions, and work towards a positive ?win-win? resolution. This philosophy and five levels of STEPS (Service, Treatment, Education, Purpose, Success) enable the boys to examine issues of trust, honesty, integrity, leadership, value, clarification, and problem solving.



They are taught the self development by caring and serving others. They help each other with the cleaning and cooking in the house as well as doing many hours of community service. They illustrated this attitude to my colleague, Susan Skelton, and me when we entered the house for the first time and each boy introduced himself to us and asked how he could serve us. This is an amazing change of attitude for some of the boys who were used to being negative and self-serving.



The boys attend school on site. Each boy has an IEP that is designed to help him catch up for failed or missing credits and to continue taking subjects to graduate from high school. The courses are offered through an accredited school in the United States. There is also a lot of experiential education. We took a boat to a neighboring island and enjoyed watching the boys make a presentation on the ecology of the island. They also showed me the mountain they climb and where they go snorkeling for recreation. They will soon add scuba diving to their activities. The boys have very full days from early morning until night. Because of the heat, recreational activities take place in the morning and with the other chores, schoolwork, and community service spaced throughout the remainder of the day. There is a siesta every afternoon. Remember, it?s Mexico!



Family involvement is also a key element to the program. Intensive, weekend family retreat sessions at Kion Bay occur approximately every two months. In addition, modern Internet technology enables parents to see and talk to their son while having a weekly family therapy session. Impressive?. In fact, I would say that Positive Impact had an overall positive impression on me.



I AM NOT IMPRESSED. First of all the boys must clean, cook and do other chores and community service (whatever that is).  The program is designed to help the boys learn "new congnitive thinking and possitive behavior patterns."  It takes 6 to 18 months.  Also the lady was asked by the boys, "how can we serve you?" There's also limited contact with the outside world and parents are only allowed to contact students on-line.  They also have weekly family therapy - which is usually a monitored phone visit with the child.  I saw many RED FLAGS and WARNING SIGNS OF AN ABUSIVE PROGRAM in this flowery post. It's been around since 1999 - there should be more information. It seems like it does have WWASP characteristics.  
The sadist cannot stand the separation of the public and the private; nor can he grant to others the mystery of their personality, the validity of their inner self...in order for him to feel his maximum power, he wants the world to be peopled with concrete manipulatable objects...
-- ERNEST BECKER, The Structure of Evil, 1968.

--- End quote ---
"

--- End quote ---

Anonymous:
I unfortunately was a resident at "positive impact" for four hellish months. I could write a novel about what a terrible place it is, but I don't have the time, so let me just say a few things. I have been out for three years, and I am still struggling with post tramatic stress disorder as a result of that sick sadistic place. I have talked to a few kids from there since I have been out, and earned about others from them. The vast majority of them now are now addicted to cocaine and heroin even though most were not prior to entering the program. One kid I knew there who was constantly torfmented by the staff killed himself the first day he got out. Do not believe the lies on the website for the "program." Ninety percent of their effort is put into deceiving ed consultants and parents of prospective residents into thinki9ng it is a god place. They use the same brainwashing techniques on the residents that are employed by the military and the cult of scientology. And "cult" is a much more accurate description of this place than "treatment program." They do not let the kids say anything bad about the program during their 10 minutes of phone-time per week with parents. The reason it is in Mexico is not the reason they tell you. Most of the staff are local Mexicans who are paid poorly even by the wage standards of Mexico. There is barely any community service. Among other reasons, the program is located in Mexico to make it extremely hard for kids who turn 18 there to leave. Also, they usually convince parents to say to their son "If you leave the program when you turn 18, we will not support you financially." They lie to the kids, they lie to parents and they lie to ed consultants. This cult does not help young men- it severly harms them. I know all too well, and my friend Eric did too- before he killed himself.

Anonymous:
i am a former student at positive impact and happened to come across this forum in response to a link i was sent. i have searched the internet to try to find some fair critcisms and opinions from the viewpoints of former students and people who have had firsthand experience with this program, so far i have been unable to find almost anything. like i said, i think its important to take into account the real experiences of former students and parents as opposed to the exaggerated praises of  the educational consultants. i myself can make a fair judgement that this place isn't anything it is cracked up to be. i spent a little bit more than two months there, not long by the program standards but long enough to understand the place and it's methods of "rehabilitating people"

i made the decision to leave positive impact last july after wavering back and forth under the persuasion of the staff and therapists who tried to convince me to stay. it was about three or four weeks after my eighteenth birthday. i was told that leaving the program was just a way of running away from my problems, that i would never make it in the world, that my family would turn me away for deciding to leave the program. i felt a real lack of sincerity on part of the staff. i feel like i was misled, my parents were misled, and so are the majority of parents who out of fear and confusion send their chidren to programs like these. yes, it is true that these programs may help kids through their subtance abuse issues, but what's at stake ultimately is something more important - the person's identity.

this is all my opinion, but it comes from firsthand experience. my name is john, i'm not trying to make a secret of who i am. if any parents or students have questions about p.i. feel free to email me at mofojo587@yahoo.

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