What It Takes to Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out

by David L. Marcus

Book Overview

The Academy at Swift River specializes in one of the toughest tasks a school can undertake: helping teenagers in crisis regain their bearings. During a fourteen-month academic term at the school, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David L. Marcus witnesses the intense process that turns these kids around.

In his time on campus, Marcus gets to know a diverse and remarkable group of teenagers: a former straight-A student reeling from the death...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618772022
• ISBN13: 9780618772025
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

My Kid Turned Out OK, Was I Lucky or Smart

Those of us who are parents of adult children can only thank whatever lucky stars shined down and enabled us and our children grow up. I look at the families in this book and can't help but see the problems that my daughter and our family faced during those school years. I read what happened to these kids, and we had our share. I still wonder how we got through while the kids in this book ran into trouble. My daughter retained her drive, ambitions, sanity. It seemingly could so easily have gone the other way. This book presents the stories of several kids who had real problems growing up. They were lucky enough to get put into a school specially set up for problem kids. The detailed stories of four kids who somehow got out of their troubles. And unfortunately some others that didn't. It's a book that makes you laugh, cry, and above all else think about your own parenting tasks.

Been There Done That

What It Takes To Pull Me Through : Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out by David L. Marcus is exactly on target. I should know: my child is a graduate of ASR at a time close to when the adolescents of this book were in the program. The book is a multilayered and serves to help explain why an approach such as used at ASR (and other similar programs) works as well as it does. The program doesn't help everyone--there are "wash-outs" and "drop-outs" and "kick-outs" but for the students who intensively involve themselves in the program, change is posssible that is unlikely to happen at home despite years of intensive out-patient therapy and highly committed parents. Part of the ASR answer seems "too easy"--students are cut off from what is pervasive in high schools: the internet, IMing and text messaging, cable TV, cell phones, videogames, sex,drugs and bullying. These accoutrements/realities of adolescence are so overstimulating and distracting, that adolescents in emotional pain use them as drugs--often on top of other drugs--to escape. The ASR program ends this cycle. Other reviewers seem to feel that parents can implement an ASR approach on their own at home. I find this view naive--it takes a therapeutic community, such as the ones found at excellent emotional growth boarding schools, to change a child with the level of disturbance/dysfunction described in this book.

A MUST FOR ALL PARENTS OF TEENAGERS

This is an entralling roller-coaster account of the lives of troubled teenagers, whose parents sent them to a therapeutic boarding school in order to get them better. One shares the heartbreak of the parents as some of the kids still flounder, but you also read about the incredible teachers who try to help the students and the students who try to deal with their serious problems. For everyone who has a teen, whether troubled or not, this is a must read. Marcus's writing is straightforward , riveting, and fascinating.

Every parent of a young teenager should read this!

David Marcus' eloquent and straight-forward descriptions of several troubled teens gives parents insights into many of the issues and challenges teens face today, whether they are considered at-risk or not. It is an unusual opportunity to hear from the teens' points of view what they face -- whether it is in a privileged suburban environment or in an under-resourced urban setting. The kids who had the opportunity to attend the Swift River program do not all wind up in happpy-ever-after endings, but perhaps they did absorb some better transactional skills; those who responded well may in fact be more emotionally evolved that most people in the world today. Marcus does not proselytize or offer easy formulas for successful parenting, but the hallmarks of Swift River's model are available for all parents to practice: personal attention, clear roles and boundaries for what behaviors are acceptable, consequences for inappropriate behavior, open discussion of feelings, routines, and reinforcement of positive attributes and behaviors rather than material acquisition...oh, yeah, and minimum TV/electronics/exposure to violence and self-victimization. The question is: are most parents today mature enough to offer that model to their own children or do they need a dose of the Swift River approach themselves?!

A story that anyone can relate to

What it Takes to Pull Me Through is an amazing book that profiles the experiences of four teenagers at the Swift River School. When reading it I felt that I could relate to all four of them. The feelings of the kids are real and author David Marcus gets an inside look at what drove them to do what they did. Marcus has a unique ability to notice important details and explain the feelings of the teens. All of us had our crazy teenage years and I recommend this book to anyone who wants to have a better understanding of why we form the identities that we do. I promise that you will not regret buying this book.