Family Program

What Is the Role of the Family?

When a child or adolescent is engaging in harmful behaviors such as using or abusing drugs or alcohol, it impacts the entire family. Phoenix Outdoor strives to accommodate the needs of all family members. Family participation in the program is an expectation, and serves two main purposes: (1) to use the family's strengths and resources to help find ways for the teen to make healthier choices, and (2) to decrease the impact of substance use and behavioral and mental health issues on both the teen and their family. Quite often, family members do not realize how deeply they have been affected by their child's challenging behaviors and unhealthy choices.

There are many benefits to family participation in the teen's wilderness therapy treatment program:

  • It can facilitate compliance with treatment. If a teen feels obliged to participate fully in treatment to satisfy the requests of the family, he or she may maintain this involvement even during periods of low motivation. This buys time for the teen's motivation to improve.
  • It provides members of the family an opportunity to verbalize their concerns, questions, experiences, and feelings related to the adolescent.
  • It offers the teen an opportunity to hear how the family experiences their challenging and troubling behaviors.
  • It offers the adolescent the opportunity to receive support from the family.
  • The family can receive education and support from other families, which may lessen the emotional burden. Guilt, self-blame, anger, and other negative emotions can be shared and sometimes diffused.
  • Family members can learn about enabling behaviors they should avoid.
  • Family members can learn about self-care techniques to take care of themselves while their child is in treatment and after he/she has returned home.

Family Program Components

  • Weekly sessions with the adolescent's individual therapist
  • Bi-monthly interactive family therapy sessions including all of the participating family members and the adolescent
  • Weekly educational teleconferences with other program families facilitated by a Phoenix Outdoor clinician
  • Family Workbook that serves as a guide to the educational teleconferences
  • Two-day on-site Family Workshop
  • Family Graduation Workshop
  • Consultative session with the licensed psychologist who administers the comprehensive psychological and educational testing
  • Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) instruction in order to assist the family members with utilizing DBT principles in the teen's home environment
  • Parent Connection Web Portal

Family Therapy

We believe that the entire family, not just the adolescent, needs help and support during the treatment process. Weekly family therapy sessions will ensure that the family is connected to the treatment plan your teenager is working through.

Each week, a phone call is scheduled with the therapist that can include parents and or guardians. The purpose of these talks is to help family members process emotions related to the treatment process, and to guide the family through decisions about aftercare. The therapist will offer feedback, support, and advice, and can be of enormous value in helping the family heal and move forward.

The Parent Connection Web Portal

Parent Checkin is a secure Web portal that allows parents and their designated contacts to sign in and view information about their child. Parent Checkin is updated weekly with the following information:

  • Pictures of your teen
  • Letters from your teen
  • Updates from field instructors
  • Student self-evaluation
  • Individualized treatment plan
  • Psycho-educational teleconference curriculum and parent homework assignments
  • Student schedule and menu
  • Links to useful resources

Each family in the Phoenix Outdoor wilderness therapy program is assigned a secure login and password for Parent Checkin. This ensures that your child's information is secure. Parents may also designate their educational consultant, clinical professional, extended family members, or others to also have access to their child's information.

Click here to enter Parent Checkin

Brooke JudkinsBrooke Judkins, Ph.D
Family Program Manager
Brooke manages the clinical family services at SUWS of the Carolinas. She moderates the online parent message boards, leads the Trail’s End parent meeting, and facilitates parent workshops. Brooke is excited to be part of the expansion of family services at SUWS of the Carolinas. Trained using a “systems” perspective, Brooke believes that the most long-lasting and successful treatment outcomes occur when both parents and children make effective changes in how they relate to each other. Brooke completed her doctorate in Child & Family Studies in 2004 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she also obtained a Master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling. She was introduced to wilderness in 2007 as a field supervisor working with adolescent girls at SUWS of the Carolinas. Prior to wilderness Brooke was a professor of Child & Family Studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where she taught courses on child & adolescent development and family relations. Her experience has also involved therapy with individuals, couples, and families in psychiatric and private practice settings. In her free time, Brooke enjoys contradancing, gardening, and making tile mosaics