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Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

337 points by Renaud 5y ago

renewiltord 5y ago
This is the dumbest shit I have heard lmao. North America (and also poor parts of the UK weirdly) is full of this Be a Tough Guy aesthetic. “I kicked my son out of the house at 18 so he could learn to take care of himself in the world”. Dumbass shit hahaha. Taking care of yourself in the world is the easy part. It’s all the other shit that’s hard. There’s a reason why there is such a strong ethnic correlation in US demographic outcomes that somehow clusters among groups where this belief is rarer. Honestly, the one learning lesson for me is that this dumb shit is prevalent even in rich families (who have the resources to be told better). Fortunately, this seems to have a significant impact on child outcomes, so you can beat the average by just letting poor parents give their kids Tough Love™ while you handle them properly. You can significantly out-compete their genetics with marginally better memetics.
newbie789 5y ago
I was in one of these and found the Paris Hilton documentary to be mostly spot on. If anything, (probably due to time constraints) it left quite a lot out.
throwaway_egbs 5y ago
I was sent to an “emotional growth boarding school” in the ‘90s. I wasn’t kidnapped but many of my schoolmates were. A few years later the department of education (can’t remember if it was state or federal) shut the school down after stories got out about the horrific things that were going on there. Kids forced to sit in corners for days at a time, ambulances not being called for kids who had very seriously self-harmed, strip searches (administered by other kids), physical restraints... I could go on. The place had a cult-like atmosphere that was centered on the headmaster and his weird homegrown therapeutic method. I had nightmares for years afterwards and still haven’t fully come to grips with what happened there.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  That's awful, I'm so sorry you had to go through that. Thank goodness that horrible thing was put an end to.
  - throwaway_egbs 5y ago
    Thanks. I understand why my parents did what they did. I was addicted to meth and probably would’ve wound up dead without a serious intervention. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. (Clean and sober now.)
    - LilBytes 5y ago
      Amazing work. From an internet stranger that's been around others who have been down a similar path. I acknowledge how hard that must be and continues to be. Keep up the good fight.
      - throwaway_egbs 5y ago
        *fist bump*
        dang 5y ago
        Sorry you got rate-limited - it's a restriction on new accounts that we're working to relax (without letting too many spammers or trolls through). I've removed the restriction on your account so you can post as you like now. If you run into any trouble please email hn@ycombinator.com.
        LilBytes 5y ago
        Thanks dang
    - thatswrong0 5y ago
      Sounds like the kind of thing that sounds like it would "help" on the surface but maybe create more suffering down the line.. do you think there were any benefits to your life for having gone or was it a purely negative experience?
werber 5y ago
I had several friends go through the “Utah programs” back in the aughts and they were abused so badly. It still pisses me off. Paris Hilton did a great job with her documentary, her experience was so similar to the people I knew.
knz_ 5y ago
The people working at these camps should be named and shamed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ganzuul 5y ago
  You are absolutely correct. It's the only way to make them take a long hard look at themselves.
  - s5300 5y ago
    They're often backed by... entire religions that claim they're unquestionably doing the right thing in trying to save the children from eternal hell. If only life were so simple in trying to make people feel ashamed...
    - ganzuul 5y ago
      That is not a reason to give up though.
    - trasz 5y ago
      Those religions should be banned and prosecuted too then.
  - dang 5y ago
    Shaming doesn't accomplish that.
  - Aachen 5y ago
    Making them go through something awful as the only way to learn? Gee now that sounds familiar in this context. Perhaps it'll work great!
- carapace 5y ago
  They should be prosecuted and sent to prison. Kidnapping and torture of children is about as wrong as it gets. Children [should] have rights too.
danuker 5y ago
This makes me sick. I am sorry for those who had to go through such torture.
_delirium 5y ago
The "troubled teens industry" definitely has a lot of weird stuff going on. Some of the institutions are are bad-faith operations that were always scams (or worse); some were well-intentioned but were managed in a way that produced abuses nonetheless. Maybe a few actually did a good job helping out troubled kids, but it does not seem to be the norm. This is perhaps a place where internet culture has been somehow ahead of the curve in a positive way. Former residents have been organizing online and exchanging information for a few decades. I believe the longest-running forum for discussions is the one at fornits.com: https://www.fornits.com/phpbb/ https://www.fornits.com/phpbb/. This site has been around for about 20 years, and used to also have a wiki with extensive information about specific institutions. Alas, the wiki seems to be down for several years now, and the discussion board is a few years past its peak of activity too. More recently, I believe reddit is the most active discussion forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/ https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/
- newbie789 5y ago
  I’ve never heard of that fornits site but I found my facility (Cross Creek) on it! The thread hasn’t been updated in over a decade and that makes sense, since last I heard it had “shut down” and been “replaced” by a “completely different” program owned and operated by the same group of people.
- Cullinet 5y ago
  accessible reddit link : https://old.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/ https://old.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/
- dalbasal 5y ago
  In a lot of ways, good faith, "fix people" institutions are the worst. Belief in a system, religious, psychiatric, social or whatnot can allow good people to override their common sense interpretations. Early modern prisons were designed to help/fix people. Some were designed by moral philosophers, experts in ethics. These became nightmarish, producing more psychological injury than many intentionally punitive models like "hard labour."
  - 5y ago
ear7h 5y ago
If anyone's interested in a first hand account of this type of thing there's good webcomic: https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/ I haven't checked in a bit but I think he's still releasing new chapters.
- Xorlev 5y ago
  Came here to link this exact comic. It's heartbreaking to imagine the pain he went through, and he's only one person among many in similar situations. He's still releasing chapters, almost at the end of his stay in Elan.
- allwynpfr 5y ago
  This was unusually gripping. Thanks for sharing.
- enthdegree 5y ago
  Good grief, that was the most disturbing thing I have read in years. Thank you for sharing this.
- grenoire 5y ago
  Holy fuck just wrapped this up before my flight... extremely disgusting and fascinating.
- erostrate 5y ago
  This was as fascinating and engaging than the best documentaries I've seen. Thank you!
- SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
  Holy shit. That was visceral. My heart breaks for those poor kids. Thanks for posting that.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  This sent me down a rabbit hole. I watched the trailer for The Last Stop, and now I'm inconsolable. My experience at a boarding school in Australia was similarly themed, though nowhere near this extreme. I feel I ought now to write to my old dormitory master — my own Nurse Ratched — and remind him of some of the abuse.
pyuser583 5y ago
Was sent to a self proclaimed tough love camp. It was neither tough nor loving.
sasaf5 5y ago
Institutionalizing someone without even telling them will completely sever any trust. Who thought this would be a good idea?
- ganzuul 5y ago
  The kind of parent who thinks TV is a cheap babysitter.
  - Jach 5y ago
    No, it requires a parent way more invested into outsourcing the whole job of parenting than a typical lazy parent just letting the TV et al. handle things as much as possible. The lazy parent would just continue letting the TV handle things even when things aren't going so well, and hey on average it's probably an improvement over the parent who sends/has kidnapped their kids off to these places, since the TV can't physically abuse anyone.
- Y-Bopinator 5y ago
  Happened to me
- nradov 5y ago
  In most cases it's parents who are at the end of their rope and feel like they have no other options. I'm not claiming they're necessarily making the right decision. It's just that they've tried everything they know how to do and see it as a last resort.
  - kulig 5y ago
    More like lazy clueless parents.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    ...and the predatory, profiteering abusers who market to those parents (and, for quite a while, another layer of attention seeking self-help celebrity profiteers who publicized them in the media.)
chmod600 5y ago
It's bound to fail when you just take any kids and throw them all into an environment like this. And I doubt the kidnapping approach is ever a good idea unless there are mental health professionals involved at every step. But I think some kids really do need to get away and change environments and do some things on their own at an earlier age. Maybe a small town kid really needs a year in the city, or vice versa. Maybe there could be more programs to facilitate that without it looking so much like a punishment.
deleted 5y ago
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postpawl 5y ago
There’s an excellent episode of the trueanon podcast about this: https://pca.st/episode/3a6af373-ded0-4a0f-b9ad-c4c0bec3e2ec https://pca.st/episode/3a6af373-ded0-4a0f-b9ad-c4c0bec3e2ec One of the hosts actually got sent to one.
trentnix 5y ago
Parents whose choices and behaviors have resulted in having raised a troubled teen make really poor choices in how they deal with their troubled teen. That’s not surprising.
- adrianN 5y ago
  A child's peer group is often at least as important as whatever their parents do. Parent have little influence on that.
  - in_cahoots 5y ago
    Is that really true? At my school your peer group was heavily influenced by your interests. Kids who played sports hung out together, kids into band hung out, kids in honors classes hung out. And kids with no other interests hung out too. By and large this last group had parents who weren’t involved in their kids’ lives. It’s just one data point, and there were many non-troubled kids who had non-involved parents. But I can’t think of many cases of the converse, troubled kids with parents who actively were invested in their kids’ success.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      There are probably no simple answers when it comes to how a person's character forms. I just wanted to point out that "the parents are at fault" is not the whole truth either.
  - slipframe 5y ago
    There is quite a lot parents can do to stack the odds, though of course nothing is ever certain. Signing their kids up for extracurricular activities to keep them busy after school is something my parents did. And not all teenagers are disobedient all the time; twice my parents forbade me from hanging out with somebody. Maybe it's a coincidence, but one of those people is now in prison for domestic violence, and the other is dead from drug abuse. In retrospect I think my parents were right to put their foot down in the case of those two.
  - 5y ago
gverrilla 5y ago
"the world is hard so lemme hit you really hard so you learn fast what reality looks like and can fight back" this, is one or another form, goes around A LOT still.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Boomer's as an entire generation are addicted to the idea that all problems are solved by just yelling at people or committing violence against them. Not to say humanity has collectively improved, but the age group which tends to "wonder" if corporal punishment should be brought back has always been very specific when I encounter it.
  - Cullinet 5y ago
    I was born very late to parents who otherwise would have made me a boomer. I'm pretty sure what you say is correct and caused by the little accepted fact that people were traumatised by the war not anything like this fantasy idealism that they just had Gary Cooper laconic takes and stiff upper lips. My parents gen (born into the great depression) were messed up to silence.
    - megameter 5y ago
      My parents are boomers on the cusp of being silents, themselves, and there's definitely some difference between what they percieve and the younger generations. It's hard to say how far back it all goes, really - while the depression and war years were certainly influential in making the culture that overshadowed the rest of the 20th century, stories of harsh discipline are age-old. Perhaps what makes it defining is just the fact that it occurred as a near-universal in the same way that the current pandemic did, and the result was a postwar generation with very sharp differences in attitude.
RobLach 5y ago
"When I was your age I got whooped all the time and I came out alright" says the parent who did not come out alright, left with an internalized belief that abusing children is totally fine.
- titzer 5y ago
  No, the ones who come out alright get whooped just once.
- blindmute 5y ago
  Do you really think that for 5000 years, throughout which physical punishment was the norm, nobody was "alright"? And that only in the last 50 years of human existence have we started to realize how to raise children "correctly"? We can ignore the swiftly rising depression rates among children for the sake of the argument.
  - RobLach 5y ago
    Do you have a justification for implying that adolescent depression stems from the lack of abuse? I'd point to half a dozen potential other reasons that immediately spring to mind. And, to answer your first 2 questions: yes.
    - blindmute 5y ago
      Please stop equating physical punishment with abuse. I did not say the word abuse, so don't make a straw man of me. Abuse is, by definition, negative. We can't have any kind of discussion about whether physical punishment is negative or positive if you can't distinguish it from abuse. Our entire society is quite literally based around physical punishment for law breaking, in that you go to jail. Society does not function with solely positive reinforcement. I'm sorry about this, and I don't like it either, but it's just a fact of life. I fail to see any justification for the strange idea that a child or adolescent should never be punished physically, but an adult should be. If there exist adults who are deterred from bad behavior due to the consequences, and they obviously do exist, why do you think that such adolescents don't also exist? For such adolescents who don't respond to gentler measures, a spanking may very well deter the bad behavior. I very seriously do not understand why this is debated. In regards to the historical context, I find your opinion on that myopic and egoistic.
anm89 5y ago
I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school. The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensive psychiatric care and were an immediate danger to others around them. I look back on it as one of the most valuable experiences in my life, not because there was any validity to the program but because it just confronted me with a lot of intense challenges at a young age that really developed my critical thinking and mindset at a young age.
- havermeyer 5y ago
  Did you keep in touch with any of the other students? I can't imagine that anyone came away thinking it was pleasant, but I'm curious how their thoughts on the experience compared to yours.
  - anm89 5y ago
    Not many. There was a Facebook group where people kept in touch which I disconnected with because it was pretty toxic. Most of the people in there seemed like they never got over it and were sort of still reliving it 10 years later and still held a lot of anger about it. To be fair a lot of them had pretty deep substance abuse issues and probably needed some kind of organized help although I doubt very many got any of that at this program.
    - teekert 5y ago
      Or, maybe they got abusive bootcamp at the point that they needed love the most.
- jkrubin 5y ago
  Would you mind sharing what school you went to?
  - 5y ago
Gunax 5y ago
18 years a slave
- Boomerchick 5y ago
  18 months
  - Izkata 5y ago
    Possibly a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Years_a_Slave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Years_a_Slave
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Cynthia remembers her daughter as a bright, thoughtful and athletic young girl who had always done well academically until she began suffering from mental health problems aged 14. Her struggles led her to become suicidal and begin experimenting with illegal drugs. When Erica was admitted to hospital and excluded from school, the family felt frightened and out of their depth. I am reminded of this piece from a few days back: A boy, his brain, and a decades-long medical controversy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27509586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27509586 I first began blogging about twenty years ago to write about parenting. That never really gelled and I keep trying and failing. We seem to have gone wrong somewhere really badly. It seems like you can't talk about the connections between physical health, social stuff and mental health anymore. It's verboten or someone decries it as "practicing medicine without a license" or (insert some other objection) or maybe people just no longer understand the connections. "A sound mind in a sound body" is a very old saying, yet we seem to now think mental health is some distinct issue from physical health. I am appalled that the parents thought they could help their child by deceiving her so terribly. I cannot fathom where people get such ideas. It's crazy making when you can't trust the people close to you, doubly so when they have as much power over you as parents have. I keep wanting to write about such things but my only real qualification is "I was a full-time mom for a lot of years and I'm a great mom" and how do you prove that? That was a private activity. My sons think I'm a great mom and say so regularly, but you can't build an audience on that and ...there have been a lot of issues I have been trying to sort out, from how to write well to how to deal with privacy issues while writing about family life. I don't know how to make the connections I need to make with people in order to get meaningful traction on what to write about, where to promote it, etc. And it just really upsets me to see articles like this and feel like good information on the topic of parenting is desperately needed and not know how to make that happen.
- isomnesia 5y ago
  I made the exact same connection as you. I wonder was it PANDAS..?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
dannyw 5y ago
https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/ is a deep and artistic comic from a survivor of the infamous Elan School. It really gives you an impression of what these places are actually like.
- gregmac 5y ago
  I spent the last couple hours reading this. It is heart-wrenching and infuriating. It is like the Stanford prison experiment on steroids, but with kids. My gut reaction is everyone involved, and everyone who knew even a single thing about this - including judges, police, social workers, government employees and of course staff - should be in prison. Unfortunately the reality is likely that no one is punished, or it is so meaningless (like fining a multi-millionaire $10k) that it's pointless.
rbrbr 5y ago
The US is just a ridiculous stupid country with ridiculous norms and believes.
- sircastor 5y ago
  That’s a very gross generalization and could be said about many countries. I think a lot of people fail to understand that while the US is a single country, it is massive and has many distinct governments and regional communities that make it impossible to throw it all under a single label.
- dang 5y ago
  You can't post nationalistic slurs to HN, regardless of which nation you have a problem with. Since you've broken the site guidelines repeatedly before this as well, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ascorbic 5y ago
For a country founded on the ideas of individual freedom, the US seems to have an incredible blind spot when it comes ot the rights of children. In any country with any sort of child protection laws worth their name, these would be illegal, as would most forms of physical punishment and emotional neglect that seem to be permitted in the US.
- dmje 5y ago
  This, x100
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It destroys this place, and you can express concern for children without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ascorbic 5y ago
    This isn't nationalism, it's a reference to the laws in a particular country.
    - dang 5y ago
      If you make shallow, pejorative generalizations about a country—any country—then you are adding nationalistic flamebait to the thread in the sense that we use the term here. Let's not argue about definitions; please just don't post such comments.
dash2 5y ago
My first thought: wow, the US is crazy, I’m glad they don’t have this in the UK! Then I remembered that I was at a famous boarding school for five years, the most miserable years of my life. Thirty years later I’m still coping with the aftereffects. I think of that place as a form of institutionalised child abuse, and frankly if someone pipebombed it, I would not shed a tear. One simple thing: it wasn’t authoritarian adults or teachers. If anything, they were AWOL. It was the students that really made each other’s life hell. Of course, we were teenagers. Much later, I stopped blaming the individuals and started blaming the institution. Here’s a tiny anecdote. One guy, who I think was genuinely evil, took psychology as a minor subject. As an experiment, he decided to drive another, younger, vulnerable pupil mad. Gaslighting him, messing with his head, that kind of stuff. And he succeeded!
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Brutal reform schools/camps can be found anywhere. Here's one in Japan whose headmaster was convicted of beating two students to death: https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0218/p12s1.html https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0218/p12s1.html
  - kowlo 5y ago
    So many distractions https://ibb.co/Xby2rKC https://ibb.co/Xby2rKC
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Which school? Seems to me uk boarding schools have changed a lot recently, with a lot of emphasis on pastoral care.
  - dash2 5y ago
    I hope so.
- dang 5y ago
  Your comment reminds me of Robyn Hitchcock's classic line about English boarding schools: "they fuck with your mind forever, then send you out to run the country".
riedel 5y ago
It seems all countries have their difficulties with their troubled teens industry. In Germany their was recently an outcry because there were cases rather critical outsourcing to Eastern Europe: https://www.romania-insider.com/projekt-maramures-german-teens-slaves-romania https://www.romania-insider.com/projekt-maramures-german-tee...
- Aachen 5y ago
  Wasn't sure what to make of "critical outsourcing" (hiring too many programmers from Romania? I'm probably missing a second meaning of outsourcing) but the page doesn't properly load for me (in Germany). I can read it in HTML source though, so in case anyone else wonders the same: It's about the same thing, German teens sent to some labour camp in Romania.
dmje 5y ago
Once again I read about something in the news and I'm just full of WTF. Unbelievable that this stuff exists. Unbelievable that any parent does this willingly. Unbelievable that a "troubled teen" is even a label of a thing that "needs sorting out". It's just so blindingly obvious that if you teach and expose kids to love and respect and fairness then they'll grow up to love and respect and be fair to people. If you teach them violence, horror and coercion, that's what you're going to get as adults. Seriously screwed up.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It destroys this place, and it's a non sequitur. Mistreatment of children exists in many countries, though no doubt it takes various forms. Letting a story like this one land on and inflame pre-existing prejudices is not the best way to process this information.
  - dmje 5y ago
    Paragraph removed
ganzuul 5y ago
You again wih shallow dismissal. Edit: This was in reply to dang but he took issue with being called out.
eric4smith 5y ago
Where do we find a middle ground?? I can see the point of people starting "tough love" camps. But also, youth of today are incredibly soft, condescending and not ready to take responsibility for themselves. We people above 40 years old built the modern world that everyone now enjoys. Many of us had INCREDIBLY rough childhoods. We never enjoyed the helicopter parenting that Millenial-on-up children got. The world (despite all it's problems) has never been more advanced, safe, Cushy and full of promise. And yet, we have people complaining that working at Amazon is too hard. The same Amazon that employs over a million people -- with countless ripple effects for families, suppliers, their families, etc. etc. Good times make weak people. Bad times make strong people. (or something like that). Maybe I should start one of those camps and make a fu*k ton of money.
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Children need loving care and nurture. They also don't need to be dictated to at all times.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  > But also, youth of today are incredibly soft, condescending and not ready to take responsibility for themselves. Where's the evidence for this?
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
    - orwin 5y ago
      Is this sarcasm?
Udik 5y ago
Paris Hilton has a trauma too! You don't tell me. By the way, can I tell you about my personal traumas?
xvilka 5y ago
No matter the reason only sick, crazy parents would do that to their kids. They should either lose their parenting rights or forced to take a psychological treatment themselves.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Desperation plays a bigger role I think. And you just can't trust any institution to handle "parenting rights". There's no easy way out of this issue.
- ksaj 5y ago
  It was our family doctor who recommended it to my parents. I don't think any of them knew how destructive that advice was about to become. And that destruction was very swift.
pawelmi 5y ago
I believe in most cases it were parents that were the issue, not kids. Perhaps abducting them (parents) to some empathy bootcamp could do more good.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  So much this! You don't train the dog - you train the handler.
dijit 5y ago
This reminds me of something; I was a “troubled” teen, social outcast, quite insular and probably ADHD; this lead to multiple exclusions from schools and constant harassment, which led to more expulsions (because if harassers > 1 then it’s more expensive for the school to exclude the harasser than the harassee) this was the UK where expulsions are as far as I understand relatively expensive for the school to conduct. Anyway, at some point when I was 14 or 15 I ended up in some kind of troubled kids training thing, it was ran by two (older than average, maybe 35~) university students and it was about assertiveness and understanding yourself. The course was only a couple days a week for 6 weeks, but honestly it completely changed my life. I didn’t even realise it at the time but some low level anxiety seemed to get washed away after that and I became a much less awkward, more outgoing person who could handle making mistakes. I truly wish I had paid more attention to the course itself so I could refer to it now. It was probably standard assertiveness training, but honestly I can’t put words on how much my life improved as a direct result. A large part of it was acceptance of yourself, and acceptance of each other in the group, we told each other what we thought of each other, the bad and the good. Most people didn’t get that kind of feedback and never thought about themselves the way they are seen by Others. Or if they did, it was the negatives or the ego. A few people were perplexed at why their ego didn’t match how they were perceived; or that their negatives were barely considered at all or not brought up when discussing negatives. EDIT: FWIW this sounds exactly like the training I had: https://www.abct.org/Information/?m=mInformation&fa=fs_ASSERTIVENESS https://www.abct.org/Information/?m=mInformation&fa=fs_ASSER...
bregma 5y ago
In Canada our government ran a program like this for all indigenous people for over a century, the goal of which was to "take the Indian out of the child". The children would be taken, often forcefully, and maybe allowed home for a visit one a year maybe not. They were beaten if they spoke their own language or indulged in their own culture. Often abused, sometimes killed. The goal was total cultural annihilation, and the results is generations of entire peoples with PTSD. Many of these "schools" were lovingly run by Christian churches in the name of the friendly government. The only "trouble" these kids had before most of them were forced to attend the schools was that their parents were messed up because they were also forced to attend the schools.
- hef19898 5y ago
  That seems to a common thread. Homes for young mothers, and their children, in Ireland. Orphanages in Germany. All the same all run by Christians ignoring love and care for the sake of some higher moral purpose.
  - thelettere 5y ago
    Maybe it's because Christians are often the only folks who give a fuck? At least the largest group that does, so there's way more chances for some of them to be damaging. I've been in a ton of shitty situations - on the street, ect - and christians as a group are way more reliably kind than any other group - particularly compared to anything run by the state.
- erklik 5y ago
  Similar situation in Australia. They're called the Stolen Generations, children who were removed from their Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent parents by state agencies and church missions. This happened until the 70s. It's nuts how recent it is.
  - detaro 5y ago
    In Canada the Indian Act allowed the state to force kids into such places until 2014.
mkr-hn 5y ago
I forget which podcast it was, but they had an interview with someone who survived one of these and wrote the book on them. I wish I could remember the podcast or the person's name, but the impression I got is these camps are completely horrible with no redeeming qualities.
tluyben2 5y ago
This should be illegal: it is inhumane and weird. Parents sending kids there are weirdos imho. They had (do not know if that is still the case) something similar in France. My cousin committed suicide after being sent there. People are insane sometimes.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Parents do this because on some level they feel resentful of the kid’s needs of them and want to push the hard work of being a parent on to someone else. The parents also tend to be in a narcissistic / enabler dynamic, so it really is all about them and solving their inconvenience, not the kid’s best interest.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Yes, which is a better way of wording this even more negative. Which it should be. There is no upside imho. It is hired bullies as a service hired by parents.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Weird shouldn't be illegal, in fact, the opposite should happen. The more weirdness can peacefully coexist, the better. Inhumane, on the other hand, absolutely. The fringes of society are under constant abuse, and it's a sad state of affairs, given that much of this abuse is straight-up illegal already, just not enforced as much on the fringes.
codekilla 5y ago
I was at Casa by The Sea in Ensenada Mexico from 2000-2002 [0]. These were run by WWASP (I wish I was making that up). What a trip to learn today that Paris Hilton was at one of the US based programs. As bad as these were in the US, the foreign ones could be very brutal (Casa was raided and shut down by the Federales). Happy to answer any questions. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_by_the_Sea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_by_the_Sea
aszantu 5y ago
To me, trauma is when your gut tells you something is wrong but your ego/mind chooses to ignore it. In this case it's impossible to think that you're not safe with your parents and then they hand you over to one of those camps. In my own case, i've learned early that mum isn't safe and trusted dad more. Something was up, the body knew. When he split and didn't want me, that's when trauma occured. I'm almost 40 now and only pulled my life together 2 years ago. Be honest with your kids. They can handle the truth, but never lies... it's okay to not love them, but lying about it... really sad.
anonymous39393 5y ago
This is tragic. What's so tough is that kids who are this troubled are in so much pain, and also cause immense pain to their families who feel helpless. My sister starting in early teens was intensely troubled (depression, drug abuse, self-destructive behavior, etc) and made my parents life very difficult. There was never a tough love camp, but I can understand the desire to try something, anything to place the kid somewhere out of harms way, both as a Hail Mary attempt to help them and to get some peace themselves. That these kids end up in harms way is the evil twist. My sister, to this day, is intensely troubled. My parents, in their 70s, are raising her 7 year old. Immense amount of resources (time, love, medical care, psychological care, money) are spent every year helping her. Sometimes, there's just nothing that can "fix" these situations it's an ongoing process. My parents thankfully are well resourced in all the required ways to provide this level of support, and the siblings are onboard as well as this will continue past my parents time. I guess I just think it's worth considering that there sometimes seems to be no real option in helping troubled kids / family members and it's a heartbreaking situation.
belatw 5y ago
I know two very successful startup founders who were forced into bootcamps in Texas. One of which is a really honest, trustworthy, productive engineer. The other is a masterful conman who has made 10s of millions of dollars as a developer “evangelist” who in the 20 years I’ve known him has never much launched a product or committed a line of code. If you get a few coffees in him he’ll tell you, “It’s a huge scam. I don’t work. I get up on stage at 30 conferences or workshops per year and say the things the ‘thoughtleaders’ are saying, but with a devilish grin and a couple of sarcastic jokes.. and that’s why I live in a mansion”.
chakhs 5y ago
Reminds me of mandatory military service in Africa, most people hate having to do it because it's a waste of time for them (1 year) they complain about the tough work but I haven't heard any of my friends saying they were traumatized by it. Which leads me to believe the "kidnapping" is probably the cause for these people's troubles, because for military service you'll know 3 months prior or something, or the culture difference might play a role into why different people take it differently.
ksaj 5y ago
My family got into this "tough love" garbage. It destroyed our family relationship so badly that in my teens I ran away and didn't speak to anyone in the family for 20 years. And even now, decades later, we are still very distant. That's how well tough love worked out for us.
anotheryou 5y ago
I have no idea of US law, but shouldn't the state law suite these things shut? Here in germany there can be a case of public interested and torturing kids definitely sounds like one...
CultCEDU 5y ago
I went to one of these places in the early 2000's. It's difficult to wrap your mind around it. it was most definitely a cult Some thoughts - archive.org has most of fornits - hashtag breakingcodesilence on pretty much any social media platform. tiktok has quite abit - a SURPRISING amount of 'counselors' account for their time at these schools on linkedin. some are even licensed now (bravo?). - this individual who has since passed away did a great job at documenting CEDU - https://survivingcedu.wordpress.com/cedu-documentary/ https://survivingcedu.wordpress.com/cedu-documentary/ - at a high level there was a literal cult known as the Church of Synanon which was disbanded in the 70's by the federal government. This cult's purpose/mission was to save people from addiction by brainwashing/abuse/prophets. These principles then created the concept of 'theraputic boarding schools'. It has since hydra'd as it is an unaccountable industry and certain states have laws create conditions for less oversight. - The school I attended, the headmaster was from a cedu school that was shuttered, his qualifications was a degree in creative writing. There were maybe 6-10 counselors from other schools who then taught the hired 'uninitiated' counselors who themselves were typically 18-25 years old, without any college education. Students that excelled at these schools sometimes became counselors themselves.

337 points by Renaud 5y ago

This is the dumbest shit I have heard lmao. North America (and also poor parts of the UK weirdly) is full of this Be a Tough Guy aesthetic. “I kicked my son out of the house at 18 so he could learn to take care of himself in the world”. Dumbass shit hahaha. Taking care of yourself in the world is the easy part. It’s all the other shit that’s hard. There’s a reason why there is such a strong ethnic correlation in US demographic outcomes that somehow clusters among groups where this belief is rarer. Honestly, the one learning lesson for me is that this dumb shit is prevalent even in rich families (who have the resources to be told better). Fortunately, this seems to have a significant impact on child outcomes, so you can beat the average by just letting poor parents give their kids Tough Love™ while you handle them properly. You can significantly out-compete their genetics with marginally better memetics.

newbie789 5y ago

I was in one of these and found the Paris Hilton documentary to be mostly spot on. If anything, (probably due to time constraints) it left quite a lot out.

throwaway_egbs 5y ago

I was sent to an “emotional growth boarding school” in the ‘90s. I wasn’t kidnapped but many of my schoolmates were. A few years later the department of education (can’t remember if it was state or federal) shut the school down after stories got out about the horrific things that were going on there. Kids forced to sit in corners for days at a time, ambulances not being called for kids who had very seriously self-harmed, strip searches (administered by other kids), physical restraints... I could go on. The place had a cult-like atmosphere that was centered on the headmaster and his weird homegrown therapeutic method. I had nightmares for years afterwards and still haven’t fully come to grips with what happened there.

TchoBeer 5y ago
That's awful, I'm so sorry you had to go through that. Thank goodness that horrible thing was put an end to.
- throwaway_egbs 5y ago
  Thanks. I understand why my parents did what they did. I was addicted to meth and probably would’ve wound up dead without a serious intervention. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. (Clean and sober now.)
  - LilBytes 5y ago
    Amazing work. From an internet stranger that's been around others who have been down a similar path. I acknowledge how hard that must be and continues to be. Keep up the good fight.
    - throwaway_egbs 5y ago
      *fist bump*
      - dang 5y ago
        Sorry you got rate-limited - it's a restriction on new accounts that we're working to relax (without letting too many spammers or trolls through). I've removed the restriction on your account so you can post as you like now. If you run into any trouble please email hn@ycombinator.com.
        LilBytes 5y ago
        Thanks dang
  - thatswrong0 5y ago
    Sounds like the kind of thing that sounds like it would "help" on the surface but maybe create more suffering down the line.. do you think there were any benefits to your life for having gone or was it a purely negative experience?

werber 5y ago

I had several friends go through the “Utah programs” back in the aughts and they were abused so badly. It still pisses me off. Paris Hilton did a great job with her documentary, her experience was so similar to the people I knew.

knz_ 5y ago

The people working at these camps should be named and shamed.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ganzuul 5y ago
You are absolutely correct. It's the only way to make them take a long hard look at themselves.
- s5300 5y ago
  They're often backed by... entire religions that claim they're unquestionably doing the right thing in trying to save the children from eternal hell. If only life were so simple in trying to make people feel ashamed...
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    That is not a reason to give up though.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Those religions should be banned and prosecuted too then.
- dang 5y ago
  Shaming doesn't accomplish that.
- Aachen 5y ago
  Making them go through something awful as the only way to learn? Gee now that sounds familiar in this context. Perhaps it'll work great!
carapace 5y ago
They should be prosecuted and sent to prison. Kidnapping and torture of children is about as wrong as it gets. Children [should] have rights too.

danuker 5y ago

This makes me sick. I am sorry for those who had to go through such torture.

_delirium 5y ago

The "troubled teens industry" definitely has a lot of weird stuff going on. Some of the institutions are are bad-faith operations that were always scams (or worse); some were well-intentioned but were managed in a way that produced abuses nonetheless. Maybe a few actually did a good job helping out troubled kids, but it does not seem to be the norm. This is perhaps a place where internet culture has been somehow ahead of the curve in a positive way. Former residents have been organizing online and exchanging information for a few decades. I believe the longest-running forum for discussions is the one at fornits.com: https://www.fornits.com/phpbb/ https://www.fornits.com/phpbb/. This site has been around for about 20 years, and used to also have a wiki with extensive information about specific institutions. Alas, the wiki seems to be down for several years now, and the discussion board is a few years past its peak of activity too. More recently, I believe reddit is the most active discussion forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/ https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/

newbie789 5y ago
I’ve never heard of that fornits site but I found my facility (Cross Creek) on it! The thread hasn’t been updated in over a decade and that makes sense, since last I heard it had “shut down” and been “replaced” by a “completely different” program owned and operated by the same group of people.
Cullinet 5y ago
accessible reddit link : https://old.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/ https://old.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/
dalbasal 5y ago
In a lot of ways, good faith, "fix people" institutions are the worst. Belief in a system, religious, psychiatric, social or whatnot can allow good people to override their common sense interpretations. Early modern prisons were designed to help/fix people. Some were designed by moral philosophers, experts in ethics. These became nightmarish, producing more psychological injury than many intentionally punitive models like "hard labour."
- 5y ago

ear7h 5y ago

If anyone's interested in a first hand account of this type of thing there's good webcomic: https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/ I haven't checked in a bit but I think he's still releasing new chapters.

Xorlev 5y ago
Came here to link this exact comic. It's heartbreaking to imagine the pain he went through, and he's only one person among many in similar situations. He's still releasing chapters, almost at the end of his stay in Elan.
allwynpfr 5y ago
This was unusually gripping. Thanks for sharing.
enthdegree 5y ago
Good grief, that was the most disturbing thing I have read in years. Thank you for sharing this.
grenoire 5y ago
Holy fuck just wrapped this up before my flight... extremely disgusting and fascinating.
erostrate 5y ago
This was as fascinating and engaging than the best documentaries I've seen. Thank you!
SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
Holy shit. That was visceral. My heart breaks for those poor kids. Thanks for posting that.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
This sent me down a rabbit hole. I watched the trailer for The Last Stop, and now I'm inconsolable. My experience at a boarding school in Australia was similarly themed, though nowhere near this extreme. I feel I ought now to write to my old dormitory master — my own Nurse Ratched — and remind him of some of the abuse.

pyuser583 5y ago

Was sent to a self proclaimed tough love camp. It was neither tough nor loving.

sasaf5 5y ago

Institutionalizing someone without even telling them will completely sever any trust. Who thought this would be a good idea?

ganzuul 5y ago
The kind of parent who thinks TV is a cheap babysitter.
- Jach 5y ago
  No, it requires a parent way more invested into outsourcing the whole job of parenting than a typical lazy parent just letting the TV et al. handle things as much as possible. The lazy parent would just continue letting the TV handle things even when things aren't going so well, and hey on average it's probably an improvement over the parent who sends/has kidnapped their kids off to these places, since the TV can't physically abuse anyone.
Y-Bopinator 5y ago
Happened to me
nradov 5y ago
In most cases it's parents who are at the end of their rope and feel like they have no other options. I'm not claiming they're necessarily making the right decision. It's just that they've tried everything they know how to do and see it as a last resort.
- kulig 5y ago
  More like lazy clueless parents.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  ...and the predatory, profiteering abusers who market to those parents (and, for quite a while, another layer of attention seeking self-help celebrity profiteers who publicized them in the media.)

chmod600 5y ago

It's bound to fail when you just take any kids and throw them all into an environment like this. And I doubt the kidnapping approach is ever a good idea unless there are mental health professionals involved at every step. But I think some kids really do need to get away and change environments and do some things on their own at an earlier age. Maybe a small town kid really needs a year in the city, or vice versa. Maybe there could be more programs to facilitate that without it looking so much like a punishment.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

postpawl 5y ago

There’s an excellent episode of the trueanon podcast about this: https://pca.st/episode/3a6af373-ded0-4a0f-b9ad-c4c0bec3e2ec https://pca.st/episode/3a6af373-ded0-4a0f-b9ad-c4c0bec3e2ec One of the hosts actually got sent to one.

trentnix 5y ago

Parents whose choices and behaviors have resulted in having raised a troubled teen make really poor choices in how they deal with their troubled teen. That’s not surprising.

adrianN 5y ago
A child's peer group is often at least as important as whatever their parents do. Parent have little influence on that.
- in_cahoots 5y ago
  Is that really true? At my school your peer group was heavily influenced by your interests. Kids who played sports hung out together, kids into band hung out, kids in honors classes hung out. And kids with no other interests hung out too. By and large this last group had parents who weren’t involved in their kids’ lives. It’s just one data point, and there were many non-troubled kids who had non-involved parents. But I can’t think of many cases of the converse, troubled kids with parents who actively were invested in their kids’ success.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    There are probably no simple answers when it comes to how a person's character forms. I just wanted to point out that "the parents are at fault" is not the whole truth either.
- slipframe 5y ago
  There is quite a lot parents can do to stack the odds, though of course nothing is ever certain. Signing their kids up for extracurricular activities to keep them busy after school is something my parents did. And not all teenagers are disobedient all the time; twice my parents forbade me from hanging out with somebody. Maybe it's a coincidence, but one of those people is now in prison for domestic violence, and the other is dead from drug abuse. In retrospect I think my parents were right to put their foot down in the case of those two.
- 5y ago

gverrilla 5y ago

"the world is hard so lemme hit you really hard so you learn fast what reality looks like and can fight back" this, is one or another form, goes around A LOT still.

XorNot 5y ago
Boomer's as an entire generation are addicted to the idea that all problems are solved by just yelling at people or committing violence against them. Not to say humanity has collectively improved, but the age group which tends to "wonder" if corporal punishment should be brought back has always been very specific when I encounter it.
- Cullinet 5y ago
  I was born very late to parents who otherwise would have made me a boomer. I'm pretty sure what you say is correct and caused by the little accepted fact that people were traumatised by the war not anything like this fantasy idealism that they just had Gary Cooper laconic takes and stiff upper lips. My parents gen (born into the great depression) were messed up to silence.
  - megameter 5y ago
    My parents are boomers on the cusp of being silents, themselves, and there's definitely some difference between what they percieve and the younger generations. It's hard to say how far back it all goes, really - while the depression and war years were certainly influential in making the culture that overshadowed the rest of the 20th century, stories of harsh discipline are age-old. Perhaps what makes it defining is just the fact that it occurred as a near-universal in the same way that the current pandemic did, and the result was a postwar generation with very sharp differences in attitude.

RobLach 5y ago

"When I was your age I got whooped all the time and I came out alright" says the parent who did not come out alright, left with an internalized belief that abusing children is totally fine.

titzer 5y ago
No, the ones who come out alright get whooped just once.
blindmute 5y ago
Do you really think that for 5000 years, throughout which physical punishment was the norm, nobody was "alright"? And that only in the last 50 years of human existence have we started to realize how to raise children "correctly"? We can ignore the swiftly rising depression rates among children for the sake of the argument.
- RobLach 5y ago
  Do you have a justification for implying that adolescent depression stems from the lack of abuse? I'd point to half a dozen potential other reasons that immediately spring to mind. And, to answer your first 2 questions: yes.
  - blindmute 5y ago
    Please stop equating physical punishment with abuse. I did not say the word abuse, so don't make a straw man of me. Abuse is, by definition, negative. We can't have any kind of discussion about whether physical punishment is negative or positive if you can't distinguish it from abuse. Our entire society is quite literally based around physical punishment for law breaking, in that you go to jail. Society does not function with solely positive reinforcement. I'm sorry about this, and I don't like it either, but it's just a fact of life. I fail to see any justification for the strange idea that a child or adolescent should never be punished physically, but an adult should be. If there exist adults who are deterred from bad behavior due to the consequences, and they obviously do exist, why do you think that such adolescents don't also exist? For such adolescents who don't respond to gentler measures, a spanking may very well deter the bad behavior. I very seriously do not understand why this is debated. In regards to the historical context, I find your opinion on that myopic and egoistic.

anm89 5y ago

I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school. The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensive psychiatric care and were an immediate danger to others around them. I look back on it as one of the most valuable experiences in my life, not because there was any validity to the program but because it just confronted me with a lot of intense challenges at a young age that really developed my critical thinking and mindset at a young age.

havermeyer 5y ago
Did you keep in touch with any of the other students? I can't imagine that anyone came away thinking it was pleasant, but I'm curious how their thoughts on the experience compared to yours.
- anm89 5y ago
  Not many. There was a Facebook group where people kept in touch which I disconnected with because it was pretty toxic. Most of the people in there seemed like they never got over it and were sort of still reliving it 10 years later and still held a lot of anger about it. To be fair a lot of them had pretty deep substance abuse issues and probably needed some kind of organized help although I doubt very many got any of that at this program.
  - teekert 5y ago
    Or, maybe they got abusive bootcamp at the point that they needed love the most.
jkrubin 5y ago
Would you mind sharing what school you went to?
- 5y ago

Gunax 5y ago

18 years a slave

Boomerchick 5y ago
18 months
- Izkata 5y ago
  Possibly a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Years_a_Slave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Years_a_Slave

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Cynthia remembers her daughter as a bright, thoughtful and athletic young girl who had always done well academically until she began suffering from mental health problems aged 14. Her struggles led her to become suicidal and begin experimenting with illegal drugs. When Erica was admitted to hospital and excluded from school, the family felt frightened and out of their depth. I am reminded of this piece from a few days back: A boy, his brain, and a decades-long medical controversy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27509586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27509586 I first began blogging about twenty years ago to write about parenting. That never really gelled and I keep trying and failing. We seem to have gone wrong somewhere really badly. It seems like you can't talk about the connections between physical health, social stuff and mental health anymore. It's verboten or someone decries it as "practicing medicine without a license" or (insert some other objection) or maybe people just no longer understand the connections. "A sound mind in a sound body" is a very old saying, yet we seem to now think mental health is some distinct issue from physical health. I am appalled that the parents thought they could help their child by deceiving her so terribly. I cannot fathom where people get such ideas. It's crazy making when you can't trust the people close to you, doubly so when they have as much power over you as parents have. I keep wanting to write about such things but my only real qualification is "I was a full-time mom for a lot of years and I'm a great mom" and how do you prove that? That was a private activity. My sons think I'm a great mom and say so regularly, but you can't build an audience on that and ...there have been a lot of issues I have been trying to sort out, from how to write well to how to deal with privacy issues while writing about family life. I don't know how to make the connections I need to make with people in order to get meaningful traction on what to write about, where to promote it, etc. And it just really upsets me to see articles like this and feel like good information on the topic of parenting is desperately needed and not know how to make that happen.

isomnesia 5y ago
I made the exact same connection as you. I wonder was it PANDAS..?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

dannyw 5y ago

https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/ is a deep and artistic comic from a survivor of the infamous Elan School. It really gives you an impression of what these places are actually like.

gregmac 5y ago
I spent the last couple hours reading this. It is heart-wrenching and infuriating. It is like the Stanford prison experiment on steroids, but with kids. My gut reaction is everyone involved, and everyone who knew even a single thing about this - including judges, police, social workers, government employees and of course staff - should be in prison. Unfortunately the reality is likely that no one is punished, or it is so meaningless (like fining a multi-millionaire $10k) that it's pointless.

rbrbr 5y ago

The US is just a ridiculous stupid country with ridiculous norms and believes.

sircastor 5y ago
That’s a very gross generalization and could be said about many countries. I think a lot of people fail to understand that while the US is a single country, it is massive and has many distinct governments and regional communities that make it impossible to throw it all under a single label.
dang 5y ago
You can't post nationalistic slurs to HN, regardless of which nation you have a problem with. Since you've broken the site guidelines repeatedly before this as well, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ascorbic 5y ago

For a country founded on the ideas of individual freedom, the US seems to have an incredible blind spot when it comes ot the rights of children. In any country with any sort of child protection laws worth their name, these would be illegal, as would most forms of physical punishment and emotional neglect that seem to be permitted in the US.

dmje 5y ago
This, x100
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It destroys this place, and you can express concern for children without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ascorbic 5y ago
  This isn't nationalism, it's a reference to the laws in a particular country.
  - dang 5y ago
    If you make shallow, pejorative generalizations about a country—any country—then you are adding nationalistic flamebait to the thread in the sense that we use the term here. Let's not argue about definitions; please just don't post such comments.

dash2 5y ago

My first thought: wow, the US is crazy, I’m glad they don’t have this in the UK! Then I remembered that I was at a famous boarding school for five years, the most miserable years of my life. Thirty years later I’m still coping with the aftereffects. I think of that place as a form of institutionalised child abuse, and frankly if someone pipebombed it, I would not shed a tear. One simple thing: it wasn’t authoritarian adults or teachers. If anything, they were AWOL. It was the students that really made each other’s life hell. Of course, we were teenagers. Much later, I stopped blaming the individuals and started blaming the institution. Here’s a tiny anecdote. One guy, who I think was genuinely evil, took psychology as a minor subject. As an experiment, he decided to drive another, younger, vulnerable pupil mad. Gaslighting him, messing with his head, that kind of stuff. And he succeeded!

Clewza313 5y ago
Brutal reform schools/camps can be found anywhere. Here's one in Japan whose headmaster was convicted of beating two students to death: https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0218/p12s1.html https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0218/p12s1.html
- kowlo 5y ago
  So many distractions https://ibb.co/Xby2rKC https://ibb.co/Xby2rKC
lordnacho 5y ago
Which school? Seems to me uk boarding schools have changed a lot recently, with a lot of emphasis on pastoral care.
- dash2 5y ago
  I hope so.
dang 5y ago
Your comment reminds me of Robyn Hitchcock's classic line about English boarding schools: "they fuck with your mind forever, then send you out to run the country".

riedel 5y ago

It seems all countries have their difficulties with their troubled teens industry. In Germany their was recently an outcry because there were cases rather critical outsourcing to Eastern Europe: https://www.romania-insider.com/projekt-maramures-german-teens-slaves-romania https://www.romania-insider.com/projekt-maramures-german-tee...

Aachen 5y ago
Wasn't sure what to make of "critical outsourcing" (hiring too many programmers from Romania? I'm probably missing a second meaning of outsourcing) but the page doesn't properly load for me (in Germany). I can read it in HTML source though, so in case anyone else wonders the same: It's about the same thing, German teens sent to some labour camp in Romania.

dmje 5y ago

Once again I read about something in the news and I'm just full of WTF. Unbelievable that this stuff exists. Unbelievable that any parent does this willingly. Unbelievable that a "troubled teen" is even a label of a thing that "needs sorting out". It's just so blindingly obvious that if you teach and expose kids to love and respect and fairness then they'll grow up to love and respect and be fair to people. If you teach them violence, horror and coercion, that's what you're going to get as adults. Seriously screwed up.

dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It destroys this place, and it's a non sequitur. Mistreatment of children exists in many countries, though no doubt it takes various forms. Letting a story like this one land on and inflame pre-existing prejudices is not the best way to process this information.
- dmje 5y ago
  Paragraph removed

ganzuul 5y ago

You again wih shallow dismissal. Edit: This was in reply to dang but he took issue with being called out.

eric4smith 5y ago

Where do we find a middle ground?? I can see the point of people starting "tough love" camps. But also, youth of today are incredibly soft, condescending and not ready to take responsibility for themselves. We people above 40 years old built the modern world that everyone now enjoys. Many of us had INCREDIBLY rough childhoods. We never enjoyed the helicopter parenting that Millenial-on-up children got. The world (despite all it's problems) has never been more advanced, safe, Cushy and full of promise. And yet, we have people complaining that working at Amazon is too hard. The same Amazon that employs over a million people -- with countless ripple effects for families, suppliers, their families, etc. etc. Good times make weak people. Bad times make strong people. (or something like that). Maybe I should start one of those camps and make a fu*k ton of money.

Synaesthesia 5y ago
Children need loving care and nurture. They also don't need to be dictated to at all times.
lordnacho 5y ago
> But also, youth of today are incredibly soft, condescending and not ready to take responsibility for themselves. Where's the evidence for this?
- the_only_law 5y ago
  The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
  - orwin 5y ago
    Is this sarcasm?

Udik 5y ago

Paris Hilton has a trauma too! You don't tell me. By the way, can I tell you about my personal traumas?

xvilka 5y ago

No matter the reason only sick, crazy parents would do that to their kids. They should either lose their parenting rights or forced to take a psychological treatment themselves.

npteljes 5y ago
Desperation plays a bigger role I think. And you just can't trust any institution to handle "parenting rights". There's no easy way out of this issue.
ksaj 5y ago
It was our family doctor who recommended it to my parents. I don't think any of them knew how destructive that advice was about to become. And that destruction was very swift.

pawelmi 5y ago

I believe in most cases it were parents that were the issue, not kids. Perhaps abducting them (parents) to some empathy bootcamp could do more good.

wintermutestwin 5y ago
So much this! You don't train the dog - you train the handler.

dijit 5y ago

This reminds me of something; I was a “troubled” teen, social outcast, quite insular and probably ADHD; this lead to multiple exclusions from schools and constant harassment, which led to more expulsions (because if harassers > 1 then it’s more expensive for the school to exclude the harasser than the harassee) this was the UK where expulsions are as far as I understand relatively expensive for the school to conduct. Anyway, at some point when I was 14 or 15 I ended up in some kind of troubled kids training thing, it was ran by two (older than average, maybe 35~) university students and it was about assertiveness and understanding yourself. The course was only a couple days a week for 6 weeks, but honestly it completely changed my life. I didn’t even realise it at the time but some low level anxiety seemed to get washed away after that and I became a much less awkward, more outgoing person who could handle making mistakes. I truly wish I had paid more attention to the course itself so I could refer to it now. It was probably standard assertiveness training, but honestly I can’t put words on how much my life improved as a direct result. A large part of it was acceptance of yourself, and acceptance of each other in the group, we told each other what we thought of each other, the bad and the good. Most people didn’t get that kind of feedback and never thought about themselves the way they are seen by Others. Or if they did, it was the negatives or the ego. A few people were perplexed at why their ego didn’t match how they were perceived; or that their negatives were barely considered at all or not brought up when discussing negatives. EDIT: FWIW this sounds exactly like the training I had: https://www.abct.org/Information/?m=mInformation&fa=fs_ASSERTIVENESS https://www.abct.org/Information/?m=mInformation&fa=fs_ASSER...

bregma 5y ago

In Canada our government ran a program like this for all indigenous people for over a century, the goal of which was to "take the Indian out of the child". The children would be taken, often forcefully, and maybe allowed home for a visit one a year maybe not. They were beaten if they spoke their own language or indulged in their own culture. Often abused, sometimes killed. The goal was total cultural annihilation, and the results is generations of entire peoples with PTSD. Many of these "schools" were lovingly run by Christian churches in the name of the friendly government. The only "trouble" these kids had before most of them were forced to attend the schools was that their parents were messed up because they were also forced to attend the schools.

hef19898 5y ago
That seems to a common thread. Homes for young mothers, and their children, in Ireland. Orphanages in Germany. All the same all run by Christians ignoring love and care for the sake of some higher moral purpose.
- thelettere 5y ago
  Maybe it's because Christians are often the only folks who give a fuck? At least the largest group that does, so there's way more chances for some of them to be damaging. I've been in a ton of shitty situations - on the street, ect - and christians as a group are way more reliably kind than any other group - particularly compared to anything run by the state.
erklik 5y ago
Similar situation in Australia. They're called the Stolen Generations, children who were removed from their Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent parents by state agencies and church missions. This happened until the 70s. It's nuts how recent it is.
- detaro 5y ago
  In Canada the Indian Act allowed the state to force kids into such places until 2014.

mkr-hn 5y ago

I forget which podcast it was, but they had an interview with someone who survived one of these and wrote the book on them. I wish I could remember the podcast or the person's name, but the impression I got is these camps are completely horrible with no redeeming qualities.

tluyben2 5y ago

This should be illegal: it is inhumane and weird. Parents sending kids there are weirdos imho. They had (do not know if that is still the case) something similar in France. My cousin committed suicide after being sent there. People are insane sometimes.

wayoutthere 5y ago
Parents do this because on some level they feel resentful of the kid’s needs of them and want to push the hard work of being a parent on to someone else. The parents also tend to be in a narcissistic / enabler dynamic, so it really is all about them and solving their inconvenience, not the kid’s best interest.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Yes, which is a better way of wording this even more negative. Which it should be. There is no upside imho. It is hired bullies as a service hired by parents.
npteljes 5y ago
Weird shouldn't be illegal, in fact, the opposite should happen. The more weirdness can peacefully coexist, the better. Inhumane, on the other hand, absolutely. The fringes of society are under constant abuse, and it's a sad state of affairs, given that much of this abuse is straight-up illegal already, just not enforced as much on the fringes.

codekilla 5y ago

I was at Casa by The Sea in Ensenada Mexico from 2000-2002 [0]. These were run by WWASP (I wish I was making that up). What a trip to learn today that Paris Hilton was at one of the US based programs. As bad as these were in the US, the foreign ones could be very brutal (Casa was raided and shut down by the Federales). Happy to answer any questions. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_by_the_Sea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_by_the_Sea

aszantu 5y ago

To me, trauma is when your gut tells you something is wrong but your ego/mind chooses to ignore it. In this case it's impossible to think that you're not safe with your parents and then they hand you over to one of those camps. In my own case, i've learned early that mum isn't safe and trusted dad more. Something was up, the body knew. When he split and didn't want me, that's when trauma occured. I'm almost 40 now and only pulled my life together 2 years ago. Be honest with your kids. They can handle the truth, but never lies... it's okay to not love them, but lying about it... really sad.

anonymous39393 5y ago

This is tragic. What's so tough is that kids who are this troubled are in so much pain, and also cause immense pain to their families who feel helpless. My sister starting in early teens was intensely troubled (depression, drug abuse, self-destructive behavior, etc) and made my parents life very difficult. There was never a tough love camp, but I can understand the desire to try something, anything to place the kid somewhere out of harms way, both as a Hail Mary attempt to help them and to get some peace themselves. That these kids end up in harms way is the evil twist. My sister, to this day, is intensely troubled. My parents, in their 70s, are raising her 7 year old. Immense amount of resources (time, love, medical care, psychological care, money) are spent every year helping her. Sometimes, there's just nothing that can "fix" these situations it's an ongoing process. My parents thankfully are well resourced in all the required ways to provide this level of support, and the siblings are onboard as well as this will continue past my parents time. I guess I just think it's worth considering that there sometimes seems to be no real option in helping troubled kids / family members and it's a heartbreaking situation.

belatw 5y ago

I know two very successful startup founders who were forced into bootcamps in Texas. One of which is a really honest, trustworthy, productive engineer. The other is a masterful conman who has made 10s of millions of dollars as a developer “evangelist” who in the 20 years I’ve known him has never much launched a product or committed a line of code. If you get a few coffees in him he’ll tell you, “It’s a huge scam. I don’t work. I get up on stage at 30 conferences or workshops per year and say the things the ‘thoughtleaders’ are saying, but with a devilish grin and a couple of sarcastic jokes.. and that’s why I live in a mansion”.

chakhs 5y ago

Reminds me of mandatory military service in Africa, most people hate having to do it because it's a waste of time for them (1 year) they complain about the tough work but I haven't heard any of my friends saying they were traumatized by it. Which leads me to believe the "kidnapping" is probably the cause for these people's troubles, because for military service you'll know 3 months prior or something, or the culture difference might play a role into why different people take it differently.

ksaj 5y ago

My family got into this "tough love" garbage. It destroyed our family relationship so badly that in my teens I ran away and didn't speak to anyone in the family for 20 years. And even now, decades later, we are still very distant. That's how well tough love worked out for us.

anotheryou 5y ago

I have no idea of US law, but shouldn't the state law suite these things shut? Here in germany there can be a case of public interested and torturing kids definitely sounds like one...

CultCEDU 5y ago

I went to one of these places in the early 2000's. It's difficult to wrap your mind around it. it was most definitely a cult Some thoughts - archive.org has most of fornits - hashtag breakingcodesilence on pretty much any social media platform. tiktok has quite abit - a SURPRISING amount of 'counselors' account for their time at these schools on linkedin. some are even licensed now (bravo?). - this individual who has since passed away did a great job at documenting CEDU - https://survivingcedu.wordpress.com/cedu-documentary/ https://survivingcedu.wordpress.com/cedu-documentary/ - at a high level there was a literal cult known as the Church of Synanon which was disbanded in the 70's by the federal government. This cult's purpose/mission was to save people from addiction by brainwashing/abuse/prophets. These principles then created the concept of 'theraputic boarding schools'. It has since hydra'd as it is an unaccountable industry and certain states have laws create conditions for less oversight. - The school I attended, the headmaster was from a cedu school that was shuttered, his qualifications was a degree in creative writing. There were maybe 6-10 counselors from other schools who then taught the hired 'uninitiated' counselors who themselves were typically 18-25 years old, without any college education. Students that excelled at these schools sometimes became counselors themselves.