Outdoor Therapeutic Programs are amongst the best programs ever devised for helping students who have emotional/behavioral programs. If the truth be known, every young person of middle school or high school age would greatly benefit by participation in an Outdoor Therapeutic Program.

Outdoor Therapeutic Programs provide an environment for emotional growth and experiential education. These factors are totally overlooked in almost every public and private school curriculum, unless the private school is a specialized school that accentuates these critical elements in the educational programs.

Unfortunately, most kids who wind up in an Outdoor Therapeutic Program or an Emotional Growth and Experiential Program, are kids who have exhibited serious emotional and behavioral problems, and many have legal problems as well and are adjudicated.

For adjudicated youth, they are very fortunate if they are ordered to attend an Outdoor Therapeutic Program that uses an emotional growth and experiential educational model, for these kids are truly given an opportunity to grow up and to also learn the academic skills they need to succeed in life.

This writer has experience in working in short-term and long term Outdoor Therapeutic Programs and has experienced, witnessed and participated in the development of young bodies, minds and spirits in an Outdoor Therapeutic setting.

The point that most all of our educational and therapeutic models miss is the fact that the current school system which we have in the USA today, is causing most of the emotional growth problems, academic deficit problems, intellectual development problems that our children are experiencing while in school, and sadly, as they enter and strive to thrive in adulthood. The schools are too much focused on political correctness and social engineering and not focused enough on academic skill development, intellectual growth and emotional growth development. The schools are too interested in social engineering and on taking mandated standardized tests that only lower the standards to the lowest common denominator.

Outdoor therapeutic programs specialize in helping students catch up in emotional and intellectual development, and become well adjusted beings who are then able to become the self actualized individuals which they were born to become.

What makes an outdoor therapeutic program work is that the experience provides the stressors that bring about the emotional outbursts which are inadequate in effectively functioning and dealing with life in an effective manner with growth outcomes when these outbursts take place in a standard societal or school setting. In a wilderness setting, the stressors of dealing with day to day life present emotional outbursts which are then turned into emotional growth and experiential education opportunities, for the child is not able to escape his environment by being suspended from school or calling mom or dad to come and get them. The student is faced with having to deal with reality and deal with the presenting problem as it is presented, and in the facing of facts and processing the situation at the time of occurrence, emotional growth takes place.

And this emotional growth transfers to the next situation after situation and when graduated from the program, the student is emotional well and intellectually developed enough and has overcome a lifetime of irrational thoughts and beliefs which have lead to continual emotional conflicts.

If I had my way, every student in every public school setting, would be required to attend an outdoor therapeutic program for a minimum of 2 weeks during their middle school or high school years. If this happened, we would have a much better world, and more of our children would escape leading dysfunctional lives with serious alcohol or other drug problems and all the other associated problems that accompany that lifestyle.