The Netflix documentary "The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping," is important and riveting viewing. It describes the so-called residential therapeutic residential school industry run with unlicensed teachers and so-called therapists, using behavior modification techniques resembling concentration camp demands and frequently resulting in complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder with many suicides and addiction problems resulting. That federal legislation to outlaw this child abuse has not yet been passed is more than troubling. Watch it.
The popularity of these destructive institutions derive from several factors: the widespread lack of knowledge of child psychological development among parents and their desperation to find a solution for their pain. Parents sending their children to these institutions are not evil or incompetent but have been lulled by sophisticated marketing. Moreover, there has long been belief in the usefulness of behavior, modification techniques with children and others, which is false.
Behavior modification, the punishment of undesired behavior and the reward of desired behaviors, works with dogs, but not cats, with people of very low levels of intelligence since it so simplifies their environment that they know what to do, and for those in such institutions as prisons where there is tight control over inmates. Which is exactly what the facilities described in the Netflix documentary have been, though not even in prisons would they be tolerated once becoming public.There is no substitute for knowledge.