If you think you and your child would be better off if you weren't under the same roof for a little while---and there's absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing the truth that sometimes teens will behave better with other adults in an emotionally neutral situation than they will with their parents---then google on "Prep Schools."
A prep school google will get you conventional boarding schools, but since this is the second time I've mentioned it, I'm sure the Programs will start putting "prep schools" in their meta tags for their web pages.
But by looking at the websites, you should be able to figure out if the school is a conventional, classic college prep school or is for "troubled teens."
Most kids, if they're going to be sent away from home, deserve the chance to try *not* to get themselves expelled from a real prep school---especially since in a lot of cases the costs are about the same.
If you're worried about your kid and rampant promiscuous sex, a single sex prep school probably won't keep your kid completely celibate, but will probably keep sex down to a dull enough roar to avoid hepatitis, AIDs or pregnancy.
If any of the kids at the prep school drink, smoke, or drug, they're probably at least likely to try to keep it off the radar enough not to screw up their grades or get expelled.
Again, you'd no doubt prefer your kid not do those things at all, but keeping it down to a dull roar will at least give your kid time to outgrow the worst recklessness of adolescence.
Conventional boarding schools probably have a number of kids with ADHD, histories of depression, perhaps bipolar disorder (since it often runs in upperclass families). If your kid has problems and needs to see a therapist you're paying for, or a psychiatrist you're paying for, there are almost certainly mechanisms for kids to get to their regular doctor's appointments.
When I broke my leg in college, the campus van for disabled students drove me to and from my orthopedic appointments off campus. A good prep school probably has some similar setup if your kid needs those services.
The parental relationship is hugely emotionally loaded. Adolescence is an emotional roller coaster for the best of kids. A lot of kids that are doing horribly in the emotional pressure cooker of home *can* do well living and studying somewhere with neutral adult authority figures.
But an overly strict environment for troubled teens is enough of an emotional pressure cooker, in my opinion, in itself to totally negate any advantage gained from having a bit of distance from Mom and Dad.
Try a conventional prep school *first*. If, with the help of a psychiatrist and/or therapist (if needed) your kid can't manage to not get himself/herself expelled, *then* start wondering about what your other options are.
I saw kids in my high school really benefit from moving out of their parents' home. My friend Tina got pregnant, eloped, dropped out of school, and then pursued her GED. She ended up not rich, but happily remarried.
My friend Toby moved into a trailer with several friends, with a $13 a month rent each (a total dump, obviously). When she got hungry enough, and embarrassed at her friends buying her school lunches out of pity, she moved back home and did okay.
Most of my friends who got real screwed up in high school didn't end up dead or in jail. They just ended up poor. There's no shame in being poor, and trying to avoid your kid growing up to be poor is a lousy reason to incarcerate him or her in a Program. I haven't yet talked to a former Program kid who ended up rich, anyway.
One of my friends who had a horrible relationship with his dad and stepmom, and hung out with the potheads at least a chunk of the time, and smoked (in my small town, smoking at school meant you hung out with the headbangers and potheads and everybody assumed you were one of those rebellious, screwing-around, wild, drunk bad kids)---he ended up owning his own hair salon. Yes, I think he was and probably is gay. So?
The only kids in my high school who weren't getting drunk a fair number of the weekends were a small few kids with no friends and no life and no dates who just "didn't get out much." They were a rare few indeed.
The potheads and the perfect popular preppies all drank---the preppies drank like fish--the potheads drank less, smoked cigarrettes more, and pot and other drugs just depended on the individual. Sex was irrelevant to social class. It mostly depended on if you'd ever had a serious boyfriend or girlfriend. If you started sex, you tended to stay basically sexually active---that is, you tended to have sex with your steady boyfriend or girlfriend. If you got really serious about someone, you thought it was forever and had sex. If you'd never been really serious about anyone, you were more likely to be a virgin. Boys, in general, tended to have less sexual experience at the end of high school than girls, mostly because boys' partners (in HS and college) tended to be a year or two younger, and girls' partners tended to be a year or two older.
When I got to college, it was a lot more likely that a given guy you met would be virgin than that a given girl, of the same age, that you met was.
By the time I was a freshman in college, I was about the only person I knew who had never smoked a joint. You could probably count on the fingers of one hand the adults living in a three block radius of my house who never took a toke off a joint (I live in the burbs in metro Atlanta).
That was the 80's, and by all measures, we were wilder than kids today. But we came out of it okay. The only kids who died in my school flipped their car on a bad curve. The same curve my mom (not a bad driver) spun out on and that I flipped a car on just driving tired (I was working split shift at the time). There were a lot of kids who went to the hospital and had their stomach pumped with alcohol poisoning, and a fair few who had suicide attempts.
Most of the time when a parent has a "wild teen" that teen is very little better or worse than the neighbor kids in the same high school---even the "star" kids like the jocks and cheerleaders. The wild teens are just madder at their parents and take less care to hide what they're up to.
Our jocks and jills were every bit as wild as the 'heads---they just had that perfect butter-wouldn't-melt-in-their-mouths act down and had all the teachers and their parents snowed.
The perfect kid with the straight A's who so piously mouthed the platitudes of SAD at school was binge drinking on the weekends just like all his friends.
One girl once insulted another, of the perfect, popular, clean-cut kids the adults thought were most likely to succeed (who, truthfully, probably *did* succeed) by telling her that if she had as many dicks outside of her as she'd had inside of her she'd look like a porcupine. It was whispered around the school a fair bit because it was such a great insult. It was also apparently true.
Some girls got talked up as loose that weren't. The more lurid a story was, the more chance it was flat false. But the matter-of-fact ones that we all knew about, frequently from meeting up with each other at a parking spot and having a beer together while pretending for the form of it that we hadn't been there to get laid, were true.
I was probably one of the ones my peers thought wasn't doing anything---unless they'd pulled in behind the car at a make-out spot or we'd parked next to each other's cars somewhere semi-public just to chat and have a beer together. And they were surprised to see me drink a beer.
We all had our vices, just different ones of us were more serious about different vices. One of the most brilliant math minds I knew was a *major* pothead. In college, one of the most brilliant scholarship kids who ended up working for the government doing very secret defense research was the local pot and acid dealer, who allegedly didn't deal harder stuff but offered me $3 per pill for my leftover tylenol 3's after I healed up from a sports injury.
The parents who talk about their bad, wild teens haven't got half a clue what the "good" teens are getting up to. The "good" teens just hide their vices well.
And the various teen vices, even the bad ones, really only harm you if you get caught and get caught bad. Otherwise, you just grow out of it and settle down and become middle-aged. Even the ones who got caught bad, the result was that they either ended up poor or had a tougher financial row to hoe.
A lot of times, the wildest kids were wild *because* they weren't particularly brilliant or talented at anything, they *knew* they were going to be working class or poor, and they saw no reason not to have a certain amount of fun when they were young. In retrospect, I think they were right. They didn't damage their prospects very much, most of them, and they didn't do much worse in life than the kids who had plain vanilla teen years.
The difference between "good" teens and "wild" teens is largely whether they're mad enough at their parents to not bother hiding their vices.
My vice was sex. I didn't stop having sex, I just got happily married and kept doing the same thing only it doesn't count as a vice anymore.
The people whose vice was pot, frequently it's their only vice, and a lot of adults with perfectly "straight" day jobs and otherwise clean-cut lives take a small toke maybe once or twice a month. I went to a party of people from a church I used to attend where the hostess, a licensed professional with a big fancy house and a good, happy life, took some other mature adult professionals back in a guest bedroom and passed around a joint. None of them are on the fast track to self destruction. Those of us who occasionally indulge in alcohol had our drug openly, in small, responsible quantities downstairs.
Something like 10% of casual cocaine users get addicted. That means 90% don't. I've known casual coke users whose lives didn't suck. Their coke use was a symptom of not having developed any particular goals or "grounding" in life rather than the cause--overage adolescents, still.
My friend who was a drunk quit without AA and stayed sober, with only an occasional *single* casual drink, until he died in his 50's (car crash, other driver's fault).
My friend who got hooked on pills was mostly celibate and stopped the pills without NA--I think she just got help from a conventional doctor and therapist. She recently married a very nice man, happily. Both of them run net-profitable small businesses, his not as small as hers.
Most of the kids who were scarily wild were playing up their vices because they were livid at their parents over *something*---I notice that a lot of program kids are either adopted or children of divorce. Most of the kids who looked clean-cut were about equally wild as the wild kids, when you got right down to it.
If your kid is wild, try a conventional prep school. And try *you* seeing a therapist to figure out what your kid is probably so pissed at and how not to make it worse. It's entirely possible that when your kid doesn't have you to impress with how wild he can be, he'll settle down because doing so matches up with his own evaluation of his own self interest.
Timoclea
