Critical Reviews & Media Mentions
"...this book, filled with first-person accounts, should be required reading in Parenting 101."--Publishers Weekly
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Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. By Maia Szalavitz. Riverhead Books. 320 pages. $25.95.
Nell Bernstein
March/April 2006 Issue
"Teenagers: They're not what they used to be. They're less violent than they were a decade or so ago and less liable to act up at school or try to harm themselves. They're also less likely to use drugs, get pregnant, or climb behind the wheel drunk and drive into a tree. But no amount of happy stats can counter the popular image of the teenage superpredator—or the notion that each generation is worse than the one before.
"Our determination to distrust our own children shows up on every page of Maia Szalavitz's Help at Any Cost, a compendium of nightmares drawn from the history of an industry that claims to rehabilitate wayward youth via 'tough love' techniques such as forced marches, solitary confinement, food and sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, 'stress positions,' and other methods now associated with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Marketed variously as boot camps, behavior-modification programs, and 'therapeutic' boarding schools—and scattered across the globe—the troubled-teen industry claims to cure everything from back talk to addiction, despite the complete lack of evidence that it works and the mounting evidence of the harm it inflicts, from post-traumatic stress to more than a dozen deaths."
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Reviewed by Mark Sauer, Union-Tribune staff writer
February 19, 2006
"Parents have tried confrontation, punishment. Nothing has worked. Or maybe the parents are just looking for some 'preventive medicine' to keep their kids from falling victim to the risks of adolescence.
"They hear about a 'tough-love' camp where kids are straightened out through severe discipline and peer pressure. Though the price is steep, the programis advertised as a lifeline of hope for desperate parents who are convinced that drastic measures are necessary.
"The trouble is there is no evidence it works. And many residential tough-love programs have disturbing histories of physical abuse and even deaths, according to author Maia Szalavitz. ..."
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Book review by Steve Weinberg
Published Jan. 17, 2006
"Szalavitz is a talented, relentless investigator. Her outrage surfaces frequently as children die, as once loving families are atomized, and as troubled-teen industry entrepreneurs escape criminal prosecution and use legal maneuvering to prevail in civil court lawsuits. ..."
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BY KAREN KARBO
Special to Newsday. Karen Karbo is the author of "The Stuff of Life," a memoir about the last year of her father's life. (This review also ran in the Baltomore Sun, Sunday Feb 19th)
February 12, 2006
"Why doesn't the bad press, the occasional harrowing death of a child, ugly court trials and law suits, and the fact that the Justice Department has come out against youth boot camps, work their marketplace magic and create less demand? Szalavitz is at her best explaining the odd wrinkles in the human psyche that account for desperate parents paying through the nose for strangers to treat their children worse than death-row inmates, and the way in which survivors of horrific ordeals tend to value the experience merely because they survived it. Her evidence is clear that the incarcerated teens are brainwashed, but so are their parents, who come to believe that their last recourse is a tough love program, without which their child will die."
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- Family & Relationships | Life Stages - Teenagers; Psychology | Psychology & Psychiatry Profession - General; Psychology | Psychopathology - Addiction
Reviewed 2006-01-02
"This important book takes the troubled-teens industry to task, exposing the "extremely harsh, perhaps even brutal tactics [companies use to] keep [kids] in line." For $2,000 a month and more, a program will take an oppositional teen to a lockdown facility or a wilderness boot camp for however long it takes to break him or her. ..."
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- Szalavitz, Maia. Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. Feb. 2006. 320p. Riverhead, $25.95 (1-59448-910-6). 362.74.
The tough-love tactics that have been lauded for turning around troubled teens are rife with abuse and prey on parents in this era of hyperparenting, Szalavitz concludes, after an in-depth investigation into several prominent programs. In separate sections of the book, she focuses on Straight Incorporated, based on the Synanon substance-abuse program; the North Star wilderness boot camp; the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, six programs operating in four states and two countries; and the KIDS program, which provoked a lawsuit by a young woman held for 13 years."
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Media Mentions
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