An Outdoor Wilderness Program teaches an inordinate amount of skills that are necessary for life. When one adopts older children, one then parents kids who may not even have learned basic hygiene, zero life skills, and often have an inability to make simple decisions or choices.

I had one son years ago, be way too emotionally disturbed to function, much less excel at a wilderness program. He’d been sent there by our county’s mental health organization and within five months, at age 11, he was kicked out, eventually he spent four years in a state mental hospital, now at almost 19 he is still in precarious straits, making poor choices, in and out of jail, still blaming everyone and never managing his explosive refusals to comply with basic society policies and procedures.

One of the tenets in a wilderness program is a group interaction and responsibility policy. They need to work out their issues within the group, often requiring a pow wow, a sit-down discussion until a problem is resolved thus forcing the kids to offer up potential solutions, trying and discarding what doesn’t work, building upon what does to help the group.

My 15 year old son, who is struggling within this program, is also slowly gaining a newfound maturity and understanding of his own issues and anger. Anger management being the main tool he did not possess.

I’ve always used physical activity for myself as a means of decompressing, of working through my own stresses and frustrations, understanding that the exhaustion I get from digging up an entire garden bed with a spading fork releases my own tension. This allows me to work and think through a situation, often helping me to resolve it by the end of a work filled afternoon.

In my son’s OTP, they chop wood to cook their food over fires (two elements that would alarm me here at home: sharp tools and flames), they are building their sleeping platforms and they walk all over the camp, hundreds of wooded acres on a mountainside. He is there with other teens who are involved with the juvenile justice system, with kids who have no families and are wards of the courts, and with troubled adolescents rife with serious emotional issues.

He is slowly learning the natural consequences that result from negative choices, he is learning how to channel and handle his anger, and he is learning both life and survival skills. This is a great placement for someone who is as physical as he is, strong and active; he needs this energy outlet as much as he needs the counseling and therapy that is also provided daily.