Is My Child’s Problem Bad Enough to Warrant a Residential Treatment Program?

/Intervening and getting help sooner rather than later can give your child the best chance of turning things around.

It’s important for parents to trust their natural instincts. If you’ve come looking for help, more help than can be provided through services at home, you already recognize that your child is heading or has already headed down a bad path. The consequences of the current behaviour may be life-limiting at a minimum or jeopardizing their very safety at the worst. You recognize your child needs more help or a different kind of help. You’ve recognized that it’s not necessary or even prudent to wait to get the right kind of help your child.

Why prolong the time your child is suffering and struggling?

Is It Too Soon?

Although one’s natural instinct may be to think of residential treatment as a “last resort”, that could result in some serious consequences for your child. There are numerous disadvantages to waiting, and no drawbacks, to being more proactive.

As an example that we as parents are more familiar with – would we wait to get a cavity treated in our child; we would we wait until a root canal is needed instead? Of course not. How long do you wait as a parent when you notice symptoms such as abdominal pain, vomiting, fever, rashes, etc. before you seek help? Do we really seriously entertain “maybe I can wait to address this?” No – when we see our children in distress, in pain, in danger, we take action.
The situation should be no different with emotional and behavioural issues that have the same dire consequences for their health, functioning and well-being.

Is it Possible to Have Waited Too Long?

Often parents who have waited to take action are compromised in their ability to actually get their child into treatment or the child now has so many issues that they feel that any help isn’t going to work anyway. In other words, they have waited until it’s gotten so bad parents feel hopeless in their situation and wondering if it’s now even possible to be able to get any help for their troubled teen. A secondary consequence of waiting is that teens can become even more entrenched in negative, unhealthy or even dangerous behaviours.

The good news is that we can still most often help in these situations. With our experience and expertise, our program for troubled teens in Canada has had a history of being successful in assessing and treating adolescents that even have these more entrenched problems.

Please don’t wait to contact us to discuss your child’s needs. We’ll give you an honest assessment of our ability to meet their needs.

Note:

Often parents have known about our Venture Academy troubled teens program in Canada for months prior to inquiring but it’s a big step to send an email or make the call – we get that. Sometimes it’s the compilation of a series of serious occurrences such as school suspension drug use, hospitalization or police involvement or another straw that broke the camel’s back that finally triggers an inquiry about our services.

That’s OK – we welcome inquiries at anytime along the way.