Story Poll Results
http://www.21c.ca/Do you think the government should regulate private drug and alcohol rehab facilities for teens?
Yes, they should be monitored by an outside agency
75.0%
No, if these facilities seem to work, they should allowed to operate as they choose
8.3%
It depends whether complaints have been filed
16.7%
Schools of Hard Knocks
Producer's Diary: Dominic Patten
Don?t let anyone ever tell you otherwise - putting together a documentary like ?Schools of Hard Knocks? is a hard going and time intensive process.
But occasionally, you find yourself with a few minutes to spare, and you step back a bit from what?s going on. Walking around Ivy Ridge in upstate New York and the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre in Calgary, I had a few such moments.
I often found myself thinking, time after time, how many people I grew up with could have ended up in places like this -- guys and girls from nice middle class homes who were angry or experimenting or playing grown up games on teenage bodies, or -- and I think this is a real root cause -- children of broken homes whose parents wanted a solution - at any price.
There might be some guidelines, and the shelves of bookstores might be filled with pretenders, but for parents and children, especially teenagers, there is no real definitive rulebook on how a family is supposed to work. No how-to manual.
Most families, even the best ones, muddle through. But a lot of families fall apart. There are a million reasons why. Somewhere in all the stress of divorces, teenagers can become footballs for warring parents. And that can be the tipping factor why they end up at places like the WWASP schools and AARC.
A number of the teens I spoke to at both Ivy Ridge and AARC told me they were from broken homes and that one of their parents told them they had to go into the program or ?they?d kick me out.? Nice.
We never did an empirical study, but guesstimation tells me probably 45 to 50% of the ?students/clients? at those institutions are from families where the parents are divorced.
What does that say about anything?
Well, one thing is that sometimes parents feel they need to make a decision between the disastrous and the unpalatable -- that they have to stop their children from going too far, that pre-emptive measures, like sending them to somewhere like Ivy Ridge, are necessary to stem the terrible tide. And sometimes parents are savagely caught - their children are out of control and harsh actions are seemingly the only option.
What it also says is that parents feel desperate, sometimes for their children and sometimes for themselves.
Schools like Ivy Ridge have a long history. They?ve been around in some form or another since the mid-seventies. Some have crossed the line and have had to be closed down or have their programs redesigned. Some have had no problems. All have turned out ?graduates? who will tell you that the school was the best thing that ever happened to them, that it saved them from some serious bad news and set them straight, sometimes both literally and figuratively. Many have had graduates turn around and say all was not so cool when they were there and that the way things are done at these schools needs to be investigated.
Our doc looks at what's going on at WWASP schools like Ivy Ridge and programs like Calgary?s AARC: their techniques, which they are very open about, and what some think of those techniques. That was our goal as investigative journalists. And I think we met it.
I know for some, it?s easy to rush to judgment on some of the people in tonight?s doc, to call them crybabies, wimps, dupes, just plain liars, or whatever else you want. That?s your call. But I think things are more complex than that. That?s what Ryan?s dad, Bob learned. And bringing Ryan home from Casa by the Sea is only the first step for him in coming to terms with that complexity.
I think -- actually after two seasons on 21©, I know -- a lot of parents like Bob are struggling: Struggling to sort out their children?s lives and their own; struggling to know when normal teenage behaviour has gone too far. And I think some parents just want to take out their checkbooks and wash their hands of any responsibility in the whole thing.
But it doesn?t work like that. Teens don?t end up at the Ivy Ridges of the world because they just popped out of thin air. They didn?t come to be in a vacuum. And neither did their behaviour, the good and the bad.
Hanging around Ivy Ridge and AARC, I thought of all the people I knew who could have ended up there, but didn?t. Because at some point in all the difficulty they and their parents decided to deal with what was really happening - to stop and bring their families back together.
Some totally failed. Some succeed. Some muddled through.
That?s really tough love. And you can't go to school to learn it.
