From the category archives:

A Next Step

Turning It Over

June 23, 2009

Twice each year our community activity focuses heavily on transitions.  It’s graduation week.  This is when when the reality hits us that the work we do at our therapeutic boarding school has many results, for indeed, The Family Foundation School is also a college prep boarding school.
The tradition at our school is that every student [...]

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Troubled Teens and Change

June 22, 2009

Image by R_rose via Flickr

One of the main challenges in each of our lives is our ability to adapt to change.  If we think of the greatest stresses in life (death, divorce, illness, job loss, moving, etc.) our inclination is often to use avoidance as a coping mechanism.
For troubled teens, these challenges associated with change [...]

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Troubled teen girls and the therapeutic milieu

June 18, 2009

Image by Ozan Ozan via Flickr

“Unfortunately and uniquely to our time, teenage girls face serious problems today. By junior high, girls have already moved into a dangerous, media-glutted, and sexualized culture that presents them with unattainable goals of perfection: be beautiful, smart, flawless, athletic, well-dressed, cool, sexy, in a good [...]

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Problem, Troubled and Struggling Teens

June 13, 2009

Recently Jeff Brain wrote an interesting post noting the difference in terminology between troubled teens and struggling teens.   As Lon Woodbury points out:
“The term Struggling Teen has broader connotations. As we use it at Woodbury Reports, it can include a troubled teen with serious disorders but primarily includes teens who, for some reason or other, [...]

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Turn It Over

June 9, 2009

Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

An interesting aspect of the work we do in sharing our experience, strength and hope with families and struggling teens, is that in the end, all we can do is share. The results are outside our control.
The challenge for our entire staff is to be forever clear about the separation [...]

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Search is about safety

May 21, 2009

Recently a few alumni critics of the school have started reaching out through email to prospective parents.  The parents then contact us and ask us about what the alumni-critics are saying.  That is how I found out that they are trying to use the work that I do with Ripley, my search and rescue dog, [...]

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Critisism and Web 2.0

April 30, 2009

Loic Le Meur, Founder and CEO of Seesmic presented an interesting talk at the Inbound Marketing Summit on launching a product with your community.
Two takeaways from him which I think are applicable regardless your level of engagement in this space. “Community matters most, even if it is just 50 people,” and “the negative feedback [...]

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Early Insights from #IMS09

April 28, 2009

The best minds in the field of social media assembled for the Inbound Marketing Summit this week.  It’s a rapidly developing field in which real time business application tends to get overshadowed by the coolest new application or the fleeting celebrity offered through the various platforms.  That being said, the task remains: how to engage [...]

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Understand Randomness and Avoid Pointless Change Efforts

April 27, 2009

If you don’t understand randomness, you can have a hard time telling a real problem from chance fluctuations. This is especially true when it comes to tests of any kind.

Your grade on any test is a combination of luck and skill. I am not going to argue how much of each goes into the mix. [...]

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Why common sense is nonsense

April 25, 2009

I’ve been reading The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow.  No, no, don’t click away yet.  The ideas in this book are important.  For anyone who has ever tried to change herself, or to teach something to somebody else, the most important is on page 9. Its called “regression toward the [...]

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