A 3-Step Approach To Decide When To Send Your Child To A Boarding School For Overweight Teens

"My child has been overweight for a few years now, and I have tried everything! When we put her on a diet, she finds ways to sneak food. It seems like it becomes a contest as to who can win the game. Frankly, she gains weight rather than loses weight when I try to control her eating. Would a weight loss camp or other residential program be a good kick start for her?"

Sending a child to a boarding school may be one of the most difficult decisions any parent could face. Childhood, even the teenage years, flies by. Deciding to live without a day-to-day connection can produce a great deal of angst. The following steps can help parents wishing to make a careful, thoughtful, and appropriate decision about sending their teens to a boarding school for overweight teens.

Step 1: Self-Help.

First, you could try to implement a change in lifestyle at home, on your own, with the support of the entire family. This means taking every step conceivable to increase activity and improve quality of eating. It would be critical to evaluate your teenager’s weight before implement such a self-help approach and then after a couple of months pass by. The major question you must address when determining if you made progress is, did it work? In other words, did your teenager lose weight and did the family accept the necessary and substantial changes required to modify their lifestyles. This self-help approach only has a reasonable chance of helping your teenager if your teenager agrees with you that his or her weight status is a problem. This agreement must be followed by a willingness to work hard toward change.

Step 2: Add structure and programs.

If self-help proved inadequate, you could add structures that might make a difference. For example, joining health clubs or specialized programs, such as Take Off Pounds Sensibly (see tops.com), can increase the focus on this important problem. If your teenager works with a trainer regularly or participates in a support group, such as TOPS, that could make a difference. Again, to determine if this new added structure makes a difference, you must look at actual weight change over time. Using one to three months as a time frame for this evaluation seems about right. You could also attempt to work with a professional therapist who specializes in weight related issues. Many of these therapists are clinical psychologists or clinical social workers who have specialized training in cognitive-behavior therapy. You can go on the Web site aabt.org and search for such a person in your area.

Step 3: Therapeutic boarding schools.

Therapeutic boarding schools for overweight teenagers can work with overweight teenagers more successfully than would be possible at home. In these settings, both the external world and the internal world are controlled to a much greater degree than would be possible at home. Opportunities for high fat eating and for sedentary living do not exist in therapeutic boarding schools for overweight teenagers. The entire focus of these programs is to help teenagers who have significant weight problems (with potentially over co-morbid conditions, such as hypertension or diabetes or muscular-skeletal problems) to address the limitations of living as an overweight person and to learn what it takes to reverse this debilitating problem. This option becomes especially important if your teenager shows ambivalence about working at weight control and yet has a very substantial weight problem with co-morbid conditions. Alternatively, if you have a highly motivated teenager who can’t seem to benefit from either self-help or additional