What It Takes To Pull Me Through : Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out
- Book Review,
by David L. Marcus
From Publishers Weekly
Motivated by a personal quest as a journalist and father, Marcus set out to report on the difficulties of being a teen today, and focused on the transformation of four troubled adolescents. His subjects engaged in activities like sneaking out of the house to have sex with multiple, random partners; stealing credit cards; snorting heroin; and engaging in self-mutilation. Their parents, desperate to help, sent the teens away from home, to the exclusive, $5,000-a-month Academy at Swift River in Massachusetts for 14 months of group therapy, wilderness survival and intensive academic courses. Marcus deftly intersperses his sharp observations with heart-wrenching statistics about the often crushing pressures of modern teenage life. The truth Marcus uncovers is significant, but not surprising: parents need to stay actively involved and interested in their children's lives. In the end, we're not even sure Swift River's program works: "nobody... could reliably predict who would triumphantly stride across the stage for graduation... and who would end up in a lock-down facility." However, as readers peer in from the outside, they learn to pinpoint the events—dealing with the death of a parent; being the victim of bullying; fighting overindulgence—and emotions that sent these (and many other teenagers) careening off their promising paths. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Marcus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was granted full access to students, parents, and staff at a therapeutic boarding school in western Massachusetts. The result is an astonishing profile of troubled teens: foulmouthed and truant Bianca; D. J., on the brink of failing and fascinated with fire; disengaged and depressed Tyrone, from the housing projects in Queens; and Mary Alice, drug addicted and sexually promiscuous. Through his focus on particular teens and their families, Marcus highlights the complexities of modern adolescence--studies show that one in four youths suffers from some kind of behavioral or emotional problem, including higher rates of suicide, depression, and delinquency. Marcus details the backgrounds, family lives, and personalities of the teens and their struggles with anger and pressure at home and at school. He then tracks their therapy and the slow, painful healing process. The teens build trust with their counselors and among themselves and finally rebuild their relationships with their families. This is a revealing and engrossing look at the recovery process for troubled teens. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Millions of parents struggle to grasp what goes on in their kids" heads, on their computers, and among their friends. As an education correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, David L. Marcus wrestled with similar questions while reporting on the maze of pressures American teenagers now face -- a resurgent drug culture, proliferating temptations and threats on-line, skyrocketing suicide rates (three times higher than in the 1960s), and more. To find answers, Marcus gained unfettered access to students, staff, and parents at the Academy at Swift River in western Massachusetts. The kids who come to Swift River have already headed down some of the dangerous paths that all parents fear their children may take -- drug use, violence, theft, Internet addiction, eating disorders, even prostitution. Known for combining rigorous courses, wilderness survival, and group therapy in an intensive fourteen-month program, the school helps troubled teenagers regain emotional health. With the cooperation of the kids at Swift River, their parents, counselors, and teachers, Marcus gained full access to students" group therapy sessions and journals; he discovered astonishing crises and surprising truths. He focuses on four remarkable kids who run the demographic gamut: a southern girl whose privileges cannot save her from sinking into drug abuse and unsafe sex; the self-destructive son of teachers grappling with his anger about being adopted; a black kid from a tough New York neighborhood who is silenced by consuming depression; and a once high-achieving Florida girl broken by the death of her mother. While uncovering what drove these kids and their parents to Swift River, Marcus opens the black box of the teenage mind. As he reveals the intense, dramatic process that sets most of these kids right, he weaves a taut, absorbing tale and charts a path to hope that any kid, any parent, can take.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
IntroductionThe girl on the phone, a reporter for a high school newspaper, had just read an article about teenagers I"d written for a national newsmagazine. One of her best friends was crushing Adderall pills and snorting them. Another friend had such severe bulimia that she purged every day. "You don"t know what it"s like to be a teenager now," she said. If I didn"t know, I was getting an idea. A doctor from Florida called to say that his sixteen-year-old daughter had just been expelled from school for selling Ecstasy. A mother in California wrote that her fourteen-year-old boy had run away after using the family"s credit card to download pornography. Adolescence has always been turbulent, but it is more complicated today than it was just a couple of generations ago. An extensive study published in the journal Pediatrics found that nearly one in five children and adolescents suffers from some sort of behavioral or emotional illness— nearly triple the level of twenty years before. Another study found that the onset of bipolar disorder, once called manic depression, has fallen from the early thirties to the late teens. At the same time, the number of young people in America who committed suicide tripled over thirty years before leveling off in the 1990s. While researching the magazine story, I dropped into meetings of parents in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where I lived. Befuddled mothers and fathers agonized about their kids" Internet addictions, eating disorders, and attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder. They worried about studies showing that hyperactive, impulsive kids have higher-than-normal rates of school failure, drug use, and delinquency. Some of the parents turned to books such as Now I Know Why Tigers Eat Their Young: Surviving a New Generation of Teenagers. Other parents sought solace in online chat rooms that seemed to start every month: DifficultChild.com, DefiantTeen.com, HelpYourTeens.com. One of the most popular, Struggling Teens.com, attracted mothers and fathers from across the country. The message lines hinted at heartbreaking stories: "Help needed for 12-year-old," "16-year-old son needs rehab," "13-year-old with anorexia," "What"s next for my 14-year-old truant?" "Out of control 15-year-old daughter," "Ripping my hair out," "Teen giving up on school—help!" "How can I help this child? How can I help me?" "What do I do?" In many ways, of course, middle- and upper-class concerns differed from those of the poor. Less than twenty miles from my neighborhood, in Washington"s blighted Southeast side, parents worried about basics such as decrepit classrooms and abysmal graduation rates. In both affluent and poor areas, though, parents agreed that teenagers have less support than they used to. Families are overstressed, many schools resemble factories, and few communities have adults around in the afternoon. Traveling the country as a reporter covering education, I kept meeting teenagers from all income and ethnic backgrounds who were falling through the cracks. To deal with these kids, more than two dozen special schools have opened across the country since the 1970s. Called emotional-growth or therapeutic schools, they are spartan versions of traditional boarding schools. They remove students from a toxic environment—a home where they clash with their parents, a high school where they are bullied, a neighborhood where they hang out with drug dealers—and offer adult role models and a new set of peers. The schools cram their schedules with academic classes, exercise, and six or more hours a week for group therapy. Counselors lead seminars on time management, responsible sexual behavior, and addictions. The special schools form one sector of a burgeoning industry. Not long ago, parents could send disruptive boys to a military academy or to Aunt Mabel"s farm to work off energy. Now educational consultants charge thousands of dollars to help overwhelmed families decide what"s best for their kids. Nonprofit agencies and for-profit corporations have opened wilderness academies in the mountains of Utah, boot camps on the Texas plains, equine therapy ranches in Wisconsin, cocaine detox programs in the Arizona desert, and fundamentalist Christian reform schools in Missouri. Jamaica and the Czech Republic have behavioral modification programs for American kids. Transporters, also called "escorts," employ muscular men and women to take hostile kids away from home. All this captivated me as a parent as well as a journalist. After bouncing around the world for nearly a decade as a foreign correspondent, I returned in the 1990s to an America I barely recognized—a country that had been strip-malled and Wal-Marted. Soulless, look-alike exurbs were sprouting everywhere as downtowns died; companies were downsizing faithful employees right out the door. While on a fellowship at Harvard in 1995, I invited a history professor named Robert Putnam to dinner. He had just written a provocative essay, "Bowling Alone," which analyzed declining participation in PTAs, bridge clubs, and other groups. Putnam put into words something I"d noticed: In the era of the five-hundred-channel TV and the ubiquitous franchise, Americans were disengaged and disenfranchised. Putnam"s theory continued to haunt me as I struggled to balance a family and a demanding job. I settled in the suburbs for the quality of the schools but found myself disillusioned with the quality of life. When I managed to get home from work early, I spent afternoons crawling through traffic with my kids—the Monday-swim-lessons, Tuesday-library, Thursday- gymnastics circuit—cell phone in hand for calls from the office. My relatives and in-laws were scattered far away; my son and daughter didn"t have the frequent contact with extended family that I"d taken for granted growing up. I kept wondering what I could do to instill resilience in my children—to inoculate them from the harried, consumption-crazed society around them.I decided to write in depth about teenagers who"d gotten in a crunch and who, along with their parents, were getting help. I wanted to look mostly at the sons and daughters of the middle class, but I hoped for a broad sample, from urban working-class kids to teens from bustling suburbs where families appear to have it all. Following a group of students through a therapeutic boarding school seemed the best way to get inside a world that most adults never see. Again and again psychologists and educational consultants recommended the Academy at Swift River, a school I had visited for my magazine article. Tucked in the hills of western Massachusetts, Swift River started with a wilderness program and concluded fourteen months later with a service-learning project in Costa Rica. Swift River charged $5,000 a month for tuition, room, and board (at the time, Harvard cost $3,800 a month). Nonetheless, the school was so deluged with applications that it rejected two-thirds of prospective students. Like many other therapeutic programs, Swift River was a for-profit business. Its corporate parent was a privately held California company that had started in the hospital and healthcare business but had turned into the nation"s fastest-growing provider of adolescent treatment programs. When Swift River admitted a student, in many ways it was also admitting the mother and father. Parents had to write frequent letters and talk regularly on the phone with their child and with counselors. Something had gone wrong in the family, and the parents had to own up to their responsibility. Every three months they had to come to campus for seminars and group therapy; then they joined their sons and daughters for the final days in Costa Rica. By the end of the fourteen months, the parents in a group knew the details of each other"s lives—from alcoholism to affairs, from dad"s fiery temper to mom"s anxiety disorder. Several parents declared that Swift River had rescued their children. Mike Nakkula, a professor at Harvard"s Graduate School of Education and an expert on intervention programs, called the therapeutic schools "parenting by proxy." He explained: "Some people who feel they have failed as parents face the fact that they can"t adequately help their children. They turn to those who can provide a tougher form of love." Other experts I contacted took a more cynical view, saying that parents were simply outsourcing nettlesome children the way they turned to a lawn service to get rid of crabgrass. Anyway, the critics said, a year or so in a residential program could do only so much to treat depression, alcoholism, or other illnesses with complex biological and environmental origins. These conflicting messages of hope and caution made me more curious. In June 2001, I began observing as the Swift River admissions department selected a peer group—a dozen students who would go through the program together. Swift River allowed me complete access to group therapy, classes, and supervisors" meetings. The parents let me sit in on their seminars and informal discussions. The most important access came from the kids, who allowed me to immerse myself in their lives while they played guitars, threw snowballs, and hashed things out during family therapy. On breaks, I accompanied them to their neighborhoods, their old high schools, and hangouts. During the last phase of the program, the five-week trip to Costa Rica, I joined them in kayaks, on mountain bikes, and on horseback. By the end of the fourteen months, I"d heard about the traumas they"d endured, the friends they"d made and lost, the dreams they clung to. I learned the secrets that they had kept for years from their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors—the very people who might have helped them. When I began my research, America was finishing a decade-long boom. By quite a few measures, teenagers were doing extraordinarily well. Teen pregnancy rates were declining, as were deaths from drunk-driving accidents; college enrollment was soaring. Teenagers I knew were far more sophisticated than my friends and I had been in the 1970s. They knew sushi from sashimi. They debugged Windows, memorized the lines from entire episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and volunteered at the soup kitchen after soccer practice. For some reason, though, the students at Swift River had taken more risks than their brothers and sisters or their childhood friends. They did hard drugs; they got drunk and sneaked out in mom"s car for a ninety-mile- per-hour spin; they went through a dozen sexual partners in a few weeks. Or they simply gave up on everything and withdrew to a world of electronic games. But they weren"t freaks. I found kids like them at massive public schools and at elite private academies. Every teenager in America sits in classrooms with them and ends up at parties with them. Seeing snapshots of them dressed as camels in kindergarten skits, or watching videos of them pitching in Dad"s Club baseball tournaments, I"m struck by how much they remind me of boys and girls I grew up with in another generation, one that was defined by the Kennedys, Watergate, and Vietnam rather than Columbine, 9/11, and war in Iraq. We can all learn from them. From the start of this project, three questions seemed the most important:· Why had the kids gotten into so much trouble at home and at school even as their friends and siblings thrived?· How could their families have helped earlier?· What lessons can the rest of us—parents, teachers, religious leaders, lawmakers—draw from a fourteen-month program that most people can"t afford? I hope the stories that follow—the true stories of what happened to these complicated, misunderstood, extraordinarily talented boys and girls —offer some answers.Copyright © 2005 by David L.Marcus. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
