A troubled teenager shouldn't be left alone. If you don't try to help your troubled teen, you will end up hurting him or her instead. Granted, no parent would ever willingly hurt his or her child. The dangerous thing about troubled teens is that you don't know that you are hurting them when you ignore their problems.

Help Your Troubled Teenager
Not paying attention to your troubled youth is a silent killer that only your teenage child hears. You might think that it is a better idea to leave your child alone, but that is just wrong. You need to take as much action as you can to help your child out of the dark world in which he or she lives.

Your teenager might act like he or she doesn't care about you and your opinions, but that is not the truth. Teenage children are especially proud and have a hard time asking for help. Instead, they ask for it indirectly by misbehaving or abusing drugs and/or alcohol.

Don't take such behavior as an insult. Take it as a cry for help and then help your child. You might consider therapy or counseling for your troubled teenager. You might even consider a little more love and affection. Don't be surprised when you start to see positive results. In most cases, a little help goes a long way.

How did your teenager ever become a troubled teen? Parents are bewildered to find that providing clothes, music, 100 dollar gym shoes, and expensive computers are somehow not sufficient to prevent their adolescent from falling into the troubled teen category.

What are the questions that a parent of a troubled teen needs to ask and who do they turn to for the answers? The first step a parent will want to take in evaluating their trouble teen is to sit down a write a list.

Write Your Teen's Short Story

Better yet, write a 'short story' featuring your troubled teen. You want to describe their behavior, when it began changing and what was the nature of the change. You will want to describe how your troubled teen has performed in school and socially over the years and how that has changed.

You will want to list who your troubled teen is friends with accompanied by any suspicions that you may have about these friends. You will want to note the names of the groups and artists your troubled teen listens to on their Ipod, what video games they are playing, where do they spend their time on the Internet? Has their style of clothing changed? Have they been bugging you for a tattoo or piercing or gotten either without permission?

There are two reasons for this exercise. First, the very act of sitting down and writing about your troubled teen will bring you insights that you hadn't had before. It will help you connect the dots, such as certain behavioral changes that began when a particular new friend arrived on the scene.

Choosing Your Teen's Therapist

Secondly, this "biography" will serve to introduce your troubled teen to the therapist that you ultimately choose. Often times when you are in a new situation - and meeting the therapist or psychologist that you just hired for your troubled teen is definitely a stressful situation - you'll be likely to omit important facts or forget the instincts and intuition that you bring to the analysis.

It is likely that you have already conducted some preliminary research into the type of therapists who specialize in working with a troubled teen. As you narrow down your choices, you will want to list their recommendations on boarding school options for your troubled teen. You will then take their recommendations on various military schools, wilderness therapies, boot camps and troubled teen boarding schools and begin researching those individually.

"Troubled teenagers". Wow, what a phrase. For the parents of troubled teenagers, trouble doesn't even begin to express the half of it. But that is the term that most often describes today's adolescents.

Times Have Changed

Perhaps as a parent you just want to be done with it. You have had enough and you just don't want to hear anymore about troubled teenagers. You make excuses for your troubled teen, shrug off his late nights or surly attitude as adolescent pranks and normal teen angst. If only it were still that simple.

The first thing parents of troubled teenagers have to realize is that times have changed drastically. It was one thing to be a defiant rebel back in the sixties and early seventies. It's an entirely different proposition in this new millennium. In this millennium you can multiply by 200% the power of peer groups and drug culture to influence troubled teenagers.

Let's briefly review 3 critical factors that this generation of troubled teenagers have to contend with that were not present for their parent's generation.

Internet Media and Culture

"The number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online."(Pew Report/05) Unlike their parents, troubled teenagers today are exposed to and have access to drug chat rooms, sex chat rooms, gambling sites and virtually any type of video content.

Today strangers have access to your teenager in chat rooms and via email. Compare that to twenty years ago where a huge percentage of troubled teenagers were still limited to three TV broadcast channels and movie rentals. And there was no way a strange man could be chatting to your daughter in her bedroom.

Music, File, and You Tube

Before the introduction of the Walkman in 1979, a teenager hauled around a clumsy boom box. Today, the Ipod serves as an intravenous feed of some of the most caustic and brutalizing music that have ever been penned. On YouTube your teenager can watch sexual escapades, demented hate speech or a tutorial for bomb making.

That is barely skimming the surface of the vast differences between what this generation of troubled teenagers must choose from and the choices confronting prior generations.

A parent once could monitor and control the influence of culture and friends. Today, troubled teenagers are exposed to a constant barrage of destructive influences via the Internet and media, representing such a monumental challenge that parents are often choosing professional help in their fight for their troubled teenagers.