Polk Adolescent Day Treatment Center is a private non-profit 501©3 corporation. They provide intensive treatment for severely emotionally disturbed children ages twelve to seventeen years of age. These children are often identified as having problems that interfere with their functioning at home, school, or in the community. Often they have trouble making and keeping friends, identified with low self-esteem, depressed, withdrawn, hyperactive, anger, and the list goes on.
Polk Adolescent Day Treatment Center philosophy is that every child does well if they can. Their program is designed to keep the child at home in their own community and back in school as soon as medically possible. They acknowledge that in most cases, significant change can occur rapidly and with less turmoil if the child is living at home.
Thanks to research, today Polk Adolescent Day Treatment Center know more about kids with social, emotional, and behavioral problems than they ever have. They no know that challenging behavior – whether it is screaming, swearing, biting, spitting, hitting, kicking, destroying property, or worse – is set in motion by lagging cognitive skills, especially in the domains of flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem solving. They now know that challenging behavior is not the result of passive, permissive, inconsistent parenting, but is instead best understood as a form of developmental delay.
Each child receives individual, group, family, and milieu therapy and treatment plan based on their particular issues, emotional and behavioral needs. A vital element is the relationship between the adolescent and their Primary Therapist. It is a personal relationship that allows the child to discover ways of handling new and difficult situations, building self-confidence and resilience. Outdoor and recreation activities play a part in the total program. The staff provides a safe atmosphere of warmth and acceptance which encourages a developing sense of responsibility and competence.
All parents and foster parents of the children at the center participate in Family Therapy. The purpose is to provide a shared growth experience and designed to give families support as well as different ways of interacting and dealing with problems in the nurturing fashion. The family is the center of a child’s emotional well-being and is essential to their treatment. Families also have the ability to participate in parenting and family groups. Polk Adolescent Day Treatment Center offers muti-family group sessions as a way of providing help and feedback from other families experiencing similar difficulties.
We are thankful for all that Polk Adolescent Day Treatment Center does to help both the children and their families in our community!