Fundamental Differences between Military Boot Camp and Boot Camps For Teens

Boot camp in the military arena is vastly different from the type of boot camps that profess to change struggling teenagers. When boot camp cadets elects to join the military, boot camp is an expected condition to fulfill before the trainee is permitted to go on to other courses or be stationed at an actual military installation. When the trainees arrive at boot camp, although they have been told stories that are simply not true, most of them accept the fact that there will be a six-week course that will require a great deal of discipline and an alteration of attitudes. Why? Because the military cannot function with people who refuse to take orders. This would endanger the life of the solider and those he or she serve with.

Those desiring to pursue their military careers and serve their country tend to be much more mature and at a better mindset for boot camp than those teens held at a teen boot camp against their will.

In the teen boot camps, the expectations are quite different. For example, the teen realizes that he or she is bound to get released back into society in the near future and they are often around others who have committed similar offenses or who behave similarly. According to the aforementioned unnamed source, he learned more about how to dodge the law while he was in boot camp than anywhere else. Therefore, for him, it was a learning experience, but not the same type of learning experience that the judge expected when the teen was told to report to a boot camp. The same is often true with privately owned and operated boot camps where parents of a struggling teen desire change paying tens of thousands of dollars for the hope that boot camp and the "kick in the pants" it offers will change their unruly teen.