Customer Reviews

What It Takes To Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out

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David Marcus' eloquent and straight-forward descriptions of several troubled teens gives parents insights into many of the issues and challenges teens face today, whether they are considered at-risk or not. It is an unusual opportunity to hear from the teens' points of view what they face -- whether it is in a privileged suburban environment or in an under-resourced urban setting. The kids who had the opportunity to attend the Swift River program do not all wind up in happpy-ever-after endings, but perhaps they did absorb some better transactional skills; those who responded well may in fact be more emotionally evolved that most people in the world today.
Marcus does not proselytize or offer easy formulas for successful parenting, but the hallmarks of Swift River's model are available for all parents to practice: personal attention, clear roles and boundaries for what behaviors are acceptable, consequences for inappropriate behavior, open discussion of feelings, routines, and reinforcement of positive attributes and behaviors rather than material acquisition...oh, yeah, and minimum TV/electronics/exposure to violence and self-victimization. The question is: are most parents today mature enough to offer that model to their own children or do they need a dose of the Swift River approach themselves?!

Those of us who are parents of adult children can only thank whatever lucky stars shined down and enabled us and our children grow up.

I look at the families in this book and can't help but see the problems that my daughter and our family faced during those school years. I read what happened to these kids, and we had our share. I still wonder how we got through while the kids in this book ran into trouble. My daughter retained her drive, ambitions, sanity. It seemingly could so easily have gone the other way.

This book presents the stories of several kids who had real problems growing up. They were lucky enough to get put into a school specially set up for problem kids. The detailed stories of four kids who somehow got out of their troubles. And unfortunately some others that didn't.

It's a book that makes you laugh, cry, and above all else think about your own parenting tasks.

What it Takes to Pull Me Through is an amazing book that profiles the experiences of four teenagers at the Swift River School. When reading it I felt that I could relate to all four of them. The feelings of the kids are real and author David Marcus gets an inside look at what drove them to do what they did. Marcus has a unique ability to notice important details and explain the feelings of the teens. All of us had our crazy teenage years and I recommend this book to anyone who wants to have a better understanding of why we form the identities that we do. I promise that you will not regret buying this book.

Dave Marcus takes his readers on an intimate journey with a group of teenagers who are struggling to find a way out of the dark. A strength of the book is that it touchingly depicts a group of teens who are troubled, in trouble or causing trouble as whole persons and not just broken objects to be fixed. It is clear from the beginning that "what it takes to pull them through" is a community of helpers including parents who are trying to find a way back to their children, professionals who realize that they do not have all of the answers, and peers who discover that they have much more to offer than anyone has ever given them credit for before. The book shows that kids must be viewed in context and that in the most successful helping equations the whole is most definitely greater than the sum of its parts. I highly recommend this book to parents, counselors, teachers, human service professionals and to teens themselves.

Being an ASR graduate myself, I was lucky enough to be there during the time that David Marcus first started visiting the school. His portrayals and descriptions of situations are right on. Although it was a very hard and trying program, involving the extremes of times when people were up, and when they were down, in the end, every person who went through that program got something out of it. I don't like the fact that other reviewers say that some people "don't make it" or they "fail out". That's not the case at all. Sure, in the technical sense, completing the program means graduation, but I know some kids who graduated who still had a lot of work to do. So it's not about completing the program, it's about taking what you learned from however long you were there, and applying it to your life. When you look at it like that, for kids it no longer becomes a "clock-watching" program, waiting for the end, but rather it's a beautiful oppurtunity to take a good long look at yourself without worry of what everyone around you will think, because they're all doing the same thing. David Marcus is admirable in his quest to write this book, and I strongly reccomend reading it, and if you face the same issues, to take a look at the Academy at Swift River.

This is an entralling roller-coaster account of the lives of troubled teenagers, whose parents sent them to a therapeutic boarding school in order to get them better. One shares the heartbreak of the parents as some of the kids still flounder, but you also read about the incredible teachers who try to help the students and the students who try to deal with their serious problems.
For everyone who has a teen, whether troubled or not, this is a must read.
Marcus's writing is straightforward , riveting, and fascinating.

I don't know why someone on this page wrote a negative review without first reading the book (seems like a very arrogant and stupid thing to do) but regardless I just finished the book and can actually offer an informed opinion about it. It is a fantastic account of what teenagers go through; the stories of these teens make for amazingly compelling reading. This is not a book about a bunch of spoiled rich kids; Marcus has instead chosen to focus on the real issues at play in our society that cause teens to loose their way. I highly recommend this as reading for anyone with kids; whether they are struggling or not, this book provides valuable insight into what our children are facing in American society today.

What It Takes To Pull Me Through : Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out by David L. Marcus is exactly on target. I should know: my child is a graduate of ASR at a time close to when the adolescents of this book were in the program.

The book is a multilayered and serves to help explain why an approach such as used at ASR (and other similar programs) works as well as it does. The program doesn't help everyone--there are "wash-outs" and "drop-outs" and "kick-outs" but for the students who intensively involve themselves in the program, change is posssible that is unlikely to happen at home despite years of intensive out-patient therapy and highly committed parents.

Part of the ASR answer seems "too easy"--students are cut off from what is pervasive in high schools: the internet, IMing and text messaging, cable TV, cell phones, videogames, sex,drugs and bullying. These accoutrements/realities of adolescence are so overstimulating and distracting, that adolescents in emotional pain use them as drugs--often on top of other drugs--to escape. The ASR program ends this cycle.

Other reviewers seem to feel that parents can implement an ASR approach on their own at home. I find this view naive--it takes a therapeutic community, such as the ones found at excellent emotional growth boarding schools, to change a child with the level of disturbance/dysfunction described in this book.

I recently picked this book up at my local library and once I started reading it I couldn't put it down. This book follows Group 23 at Swift River, a sort of rehabilitation center and school, from the reason their parents decided to shell out the $70,000 for their (usually) 14 month stay to his interviews with the four students after their graduation. This book provides a comprehensive look at what is happening to youth in this generation. The students he choose to highlight did not represent only one certain socio-economic class or all have one distinct problem that they shared. Rather he choose a bulimic Texan who drove a leather seated SUV, a depressed boy from Queens who lived across the street from the Projects, a girl who was forced to deal with the death of her mother, a low life boyfriend and sexual assault, and an adopted boy who was a bit too fascinated with fire. This book takes you through their struggles and triumphs. Whether or not the school is a triumph or that the members of the Group will triumph in life is left to leave you wondering.

Highly recommended reading!

I was initially drawn to this book because I was the parent of a "struggling teen" looking for answers. But now that I've read it, I can really recommend this book to anyone. I cried when the kids in the book had setbacks. Many of them have to deal with cancer and deaths among family and friends, on top of the other problems that teens have to get through: pressure to be thin, have sex, etc. Marcus does an amazing job of letting the reader know what each of the kids is thinking and feeling.

A teen can get off course very quickly, and their parents are usually the last to understand what's gone wrong or what to do about it. Reading this book will help parents to recognize the signs before it's too late. There's no obvious reason why some kids will recover from problems they encounter in life while others get into trouble, but once it happens, they often need to be in a therapeutic setting like that depicted in the book.

The four kids depicted in the book are now approaching the age of 21, and I've heard that they're turning into responsible, happy, successful adults. The author does speaking engagements, and sometimes one of the four students will accompany him to speak about their experiences.

If you're a parent of a teen or a pre-teen, this is absolutely a must-read.