ADD Student Leadership offers four-day retreats for teenagers 14-18 years old and their families.  The programs are youth-focused and adult facilitated but parental involvement for a brief but critical time at the beginning and end of the program is essential.  Parents stay for the first afternoon with an overnight optional.

Facilitators set expectations with parents in terms of their own behaviors. One objective of the program is to bring disempowered behaviors to consciousness with both parents and teens so that when, not if, disempowered patterns emerge, they will have the tools to facilitate positive change.

For the teens, the focus at the beginning of the program is experiential, emphasizing immersion
into nature and wilderness activities. Survival in the wilderness is used as a metaphor to teach leadership and provide successful experiences that build confidence.

When teens have successfully learned how to build a fire, make shelter, or find their way in the forest, they can understand how these survival skills work in their everyday life.

Adult trackers from Children of the Earth Foundation introduce teens to wilderness survival skills and discuss how finding their way in the forest is a metaphor for finding their way in life.  Leadership experts connect these skills to leadership attitudes and self-management and help them to explore in a non-threatening way how they impact others and others impact them. They direct the teens in demystifying and normalizing the social, emotional, and self-esteem aspects of ADHD.

Other experts address the role of sexuality and drugs, both legal and illegal, and their impact on the individual and family system.

Teens learn how to advocate for themselves in school, with family and friends, understand the difference between shame, blame, and guilt, and, how to manage their time.

For most of the program, teens participate as a single group of 15 but are separated by gender for the discussions on sex and drugs.

On the last day students share with their parents what they have discovered over the course of 4 days and what kind of support they need to develop themselves as leaders. Both parent and child acknowledge each other’s gifts in a closing ceremony and leave with a contract stating what they will do to change disempowering behaviors and, a vision of what they want in their family.  Both teens and parents leave with skills and resources to support the development of healthy relationships.