Free Republic

At 2 a.m., teenagers are woken up to strangers in their bedrooms. Then, they’re driven hours away, often to the midwest. What awaits them is abuse, hard physical labor and sadness– all paid for by their parents. This is the story of many children in the troubled teen industry. The troubled teen industry is a name coined by survivors for the system of underregulated residential youth treatment facilities. Many parents send their children to these programs for drug and alcohol use, mental health, eating disorders, disabilities, conversion therapy and more. These programs promise to rehabilitate teenagers from their troubles. Instead,...

Editor’s note: this story has been updated to clarify the appeals court order, which halts any action in the case until further notice. The Missouri Court of Appeals has ordered a Cedar County judge to halt all further action in the Agape Boarding School case until it issues a final decision on a recent motion. “You are directed to refrain from taking further action,” the appellate court wrote in a ruling that was issued Wednesday, “ ... until further order of this court.” In what is called a preliminary writ of prohibition, the appellate court said the only action Associate...

When parents first heard about Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) in the 1990s, it felt like a lifeline — for both them and their autistic kids. ABA was an intensive therapy based around a system of rewards and punishments designed to change children’s behavior; through repetition and consistent reinforcement, good behaviors could be formed, while undesirable ones were eliminated. The therapy was individualized and time-consuming — to the tune of 40 hours a week — and it needed to be delivered early in a child’s development. Suddenly parents were seeing positive results. For some, it offered the promise of normalcy for...