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"I hope you tell kids that this really does work and I am an example."

Family Functioning After Wilderness Therapy

For our staff and our families, one of the most satisfying outcomes of Freer treatment is the families' nearly universal experience of much improved and more pleasant relationships with their returning children, closely related to the kids' improved behavior at home and in the community and steadier emotional lives. Much of this change is because the children come home determined to make better lives for themselves and to appreciate and work with their families, while they have also learned a good deal about themselves and matured from the experiences of hard, challenging work taking care of themselves and learning new skills. The kids' part is what most of our research has been aimed at. But their success at home, or at boarding schools after Freer, also depends very substantially on what their parents have learned about them and about family life, and what they have decided to do to improve family life and their children's future lives.

Freer has done three outcome studies to try to understand how family life can change after wilderness therapy for the kids, and what factors lead to those changes.

In 2000 Jackie Cupples, with assistance from Ciel Sanders (a wilderness guide and a therapist,) working with Rob Cooley, a psychologist and the program director, wrote up a one-year study of a pilot questionnaire we had developed to try to get at these questions. (No. 6.) In particular, we worked out some questions about elements of family life that we thought might improve and could serve as gauges to improved communication, understanding and positive effort among family members. These were questions about how often the family at dinner together, how much time parents spent with the returned child in out-of-home activities or in evenings at home together, how much the child helped with chores, and so on. In addition, we had more common questions about the kids' behavior at home and in the community, and their self-management and emotions. What we found was that at two months after the program our graduates, as rated by their parents, had improved substantially on all of our measures, but especially on the child performance ones. At one year after treatment, the answers overall averaged solid maintenance of those gains, but with little average change. However, child performance ratings generally continued to go up, while family interaction measures back-slid a little.

A very heartening response was that, at four weeks after treatment, 80 percent of the kids, and 73 percent of their parents/families were involved in out-patient treatment, and after one year 65 percent of the parents still were, while the participation of our graduates in out-patient programs had risen to 90 percent.

Taking that as a good start, we added more questions and more families (124 responded to the two-month questionnaire) and Nevin Harper, Ph.D., and his doctoral program supervisor, Keith Russell, Ph.D. kindly analyzed the results statistically and wrote them up. (No. 13.) The results were about the same, though, with the statistics emphasizing that. At two months the kids improved on all measures, but with statistical significance on only one of the "Family Function" questions, while improving on about six of the "Adolescent Behavior" questions and two of the "Mental Health" ones. On one family questioning, family arguments, both boys and girls actually argued more with their parents - so be prepared for some warm discussions when they come home! Those results were well maintained at 12 months, though family time together was statistically down some, while two performance measures were up some. (Please see adjoining Table.)

Dr. Harper rounded out his exploration of family change due to wilderness treatment with his Ph.D. dissertation, which used a family evaluation test at Freer and another OBHIC program. (No. 14.) The test failed to generate much in the way of concrete results, perhaps, as Dr. Harper suggests, because it looks for airy constructs that somehow miss the real changes that often take place. Dr. Harper's dissertation is an informed, thoughtful discussion of the nature and role of family and family work in adolescent treatment.

At Freer, our therapy supervisors and field staff are compiling a practical list of family changes we have observed in recent years, as a next step toward understanding what kinds of changes do occur, how they help the families' children, and how we can assist in bringing them about.

Learn more about our research: