So often I hear from parents that their spouse is not on the same page with .. and that's not always when it's a divorced family, sometimes it's the same in a married intact family.

 So often when parents get divorced the kids end up living full time with mom and only see dad on weekends (or maybe visa versa)or maybe sometimes not even that often but when the do see dad it feels like Mom is the disciplinarian and dad ends up being the Disney Land dad, always taking the kids out for dinners or doing some kind of activity to have fun then taking them back to moms house after they have been eating things that they shouldn't or eating too much sugar laden foods so now mom has to peel them off the wall and get them ready for bed and a new week at school.

One parent is often to strict or at least feels like they are the bad guy while the other parent is out there  giving the kids the time of their lives not really caring what consequences come up once the kids are dropped back off at home. We as parents very often send conflict messages to our children.Which in turn teachers our kids learn very quickly to manipulate us and any other adult in their lives. I'ts hard enough when you are the biological parents to agree what the rules and expection should be in your home and then to get everyone to live by those rules. But then you take two families and try to blend them together and it can be very difficult for you as the step parent or maybe you are the parent caught in the middle. you love your new spouse but you love your son, even though you know that sending him away from home to a residential treatment center will do him so good, and will probably affect the whole family for good. 

Many times just getting the kids away from home and into a secure, structured, environment will be helpful. Getting your child away from the bad influence of their friends and putting them in an environment where they will have positive peer pressures  not the nevegetive peer pressure she/he is with right now.

Placement in a program will give your teen the time to take a look at their lives and reassess their goals and start taking the baby steps to reach those goals, with others that are setting goals and making the baby-steps to reach those goals. they will be associating with kids just like themselves not the hard core kids, but basically good kids making poor choices,