We often find that change is difficult as long as the teenager remains in the home environment. Influences outside the home impact behavior.

Residential programs can effect thoughtful changes in troubled adolescence and teenagers by removing them from the school and locality and putting them in a healthy and controlled atmosphere where they can focus on behavioral change.

The outdoor activities involved entail one27s application of natural skills which may enhance self-confidence and alertness, as well as validate satisfaction within one's self.

Student's camps in the mountains, desert, or other natural areas, learn to make their food, gather water, and build fire without matches. The natural environment says collaboration among participants, which helps to make positive peer relationships.

Most conventional wilderness programs are based on the idea of using exploration to encourage a teenager's growth. The environment calls for the use of one's vital abilities in programs.

These programs work to break up this unsuccessful pattern by empowering students throughout a challenging, controlled emotional and physical growth curriculum in which each teenager can seek out and discover the tools he or she needs to move forward adulthood.

These types of programs have proven too highly effective as a first intervention for adolescents going on to a specialized boarding school or emotional growth program. Wilderness helps teenagers start to learn that they can be independent, safe and successful away from their family and friends.

Wilderness programs have assisted young people to recognize and work through internal conflicts and disturbing obstacles that have kept them from responding to parental efforts, schools, and treatment.

The challenges innate in an outdoor setting suggest an effective way for adolescence to achieve a sense of self-confidence, self-awareness, and personal fulfillment.

Mainly wilderness programs use a small-group format and support interdependence and collaboration among group members. In journey programs, where youth and counselors venture out into natural settings for extended periods of time, the 24-hour-a-day group experience becomes very powerful.

The group atmosphere teaches them the value of assistance and joint effort. Through the development of wilderness skills, adolescence develops healthy self-respect and learns to answer in positive ways to their peers and to authority.