PASADENA – Boot camps often serve as hired disciplinarians for parents fearful of the fallout that could result from spanking their children, according to a parent who enrolled three of his children in a Pasadena camp.

“In Mexico, you hit your children and the police don’t get involved,” said Silvino Montagner, 38, of West Covina. “In America, you hit you kids and the police and the social workers get involved. So you send your kids to boot camp because you can’t discipline your kids.”

It is legal to spank your children in California, as long as the discipline is reasonable and doesn’t inflict bodily harm, according to state law.

However, fearful of what a spanking might lead to in terms of involvement from the authorities, Montagner sent his two girls, Alejandra Montagner and Marlene Montagner and his son to Sarge’s Community Base/Commit II Achieve Camp in Pasadena in 2008.

“My girls weren’t listening to us,” Montagner said. “They were getting into trouble, they were cursing and had boyfriends.”

As social norms shift away from corporal punishment, and parents lose their sense that they have control of their children, boot camps have become appealing, said Robert Larzalere, professor of human development and family science at Oklahoma State University and an expert on parental discipline.

“When we look at these parents, they don’t feel empowered and that leads to people looking at these boot camps, because they don’t feel they have parental authorities,” Larzalere said.

The parents entrust the boot camps to mete out discipline and often don’t object to harsh treatment such as “smoking,” a practice where children are forced to drink water to the point of vomiting, Montagner said.

Smoking was employed as a tactic at Sarge’s Community Base/Commit II Achieve Camp, Montagner said.

Tough love boot camp have come under scrutiny in recent weeks after this newspaper published two videos on its website showing harsh treatment of children in the care of boot camp drill instructors.

In one of the videos, drill instructors are “smoking” children – urging them to binge on drinking water to the point of vomiting.

According to Dr. Harlan Bixby, an expert on the effect of fluids in the body, “smoking” could be fatal.

In a second video, a pre-teen boy is seen carrying a truck tire around his neck. Drill instructors, including one active duty Marine, can been seen berating the boy until he falls to the ground in tears.

Kelvin “Sgt. Mac” McFarland, who runs Family First Growth Camp can be seen in both videos.

The voice of Keith “Sarge” Gibbs can be heard on one of the videos.

Both men deny being present during either taping.

Boot camp operators promise parents marked improvement in their child’s behavior; they also play on the fears of parents insisting that boot camps are their last resort.

“The system can’t help you until your child gets into trouble,” Gibbs said.

But any claims that boot camps can make permanent changes in a child’s behavior ignores what development experts know about the adolescent psyche.

“I think many of them believe it changes people for life, but the adolescent brain is not wired like that,” said Joyce Burrell, director of the juvenile justice program in Human and Social Development for American Institute for Research. “The adolescent brain is malleable as a three-year-old.”

Far from a cure-all, Silvino Montagner found boot camps did little to change his daughters’ behavior.

He pulled Alejandra Montagner from the boot camp after she initiated what her father termed an inappropriate relationship with a drill instructor.

“It wasn’t illegal because of their ages, but I thought an instructor should never date one of the cadets,” he said.

Marlene Montagner, who ascended to the rank of junior drill instructor at Gibbs camp, is currently in jail for theft.

“In general boot camps make kids worse,” Larzalere said. “Boot camps are the number one example of a scared straight style treatment where kids get worse.”

Larzalere, an advocate for the proper use of spanking, said the shock treatments used in boot camps are less effective than appropriate spanking.

Boot camps were stylish in the 1990s. Juvenile detention experts in states across the country “thought the discipline and the regimentation was effective.”

Since then, states, school districts and municipalities have cooled to the idea of contracting with boot camps.

“Once these programs were evaluated, we saw they were no better than leaving children alone,” Burrell said. “They are modeled on a military training or get-tough approach, but it didn’t have a long-lasting impact on children.”

During her time as the director of Division of Juvenile Justice for the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, Burrell gained first-hand knowledge of the dangers of boot camps and the drill instructors who are often bent on discipline.

“In the boot camp some of the officers kicked children and held children on the ground some with their knees in the children’s backs,” Burrell said.

Many of the children in boot camps are saddled with a host of emotional problems, which require more attention than what’s available at a boot camp.

“A lot of times (the children) have undiagnosed special needs, it may be reaction to traumatic exposure,” Burrell said. “We need to get to the source of that so we can teach some different behavior and it’s not a boot camp that’s going to teach that.”

brian.charles@sgvn.com

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