It’s heartbreaking to watch a teenage child fall into substance abuse and addiction, and once parents make the decision that professional help and residential treatment is needed, a whole new set of challenges emerge, and it can be very hard to know where to get the best help for your son or daughter.

Price is always a consideration, and your degree of insurance coverage and the amount you can afford to contribute does impact on the decision; but it’s always about more than price, and you want to find a drug or alcohol rehab that offers your teen the best quality treatment, that offers quality teen specific treatments, and that offers them the best total chance of sobriety and a life of health and happiness.

Here are 4 criteria that you may use to help in the evaluation process between available rehabs in your area. This can never be a complete list, and there always intangibles, but using the following criteria may help you to narrow down the list, and may make the decision just a little bit easier.

4 ways to evaluate a teen drug or alcohol rehab

1) Is it a teen specific program?

Although many adult facilities maintain that they can offer effective treatments to people of all ages, teens do far better in age specific programming. Teens do not have the same issues or problems as adults in recovery, and face a completely different set of developmental and recovery challenges. Your teen needs to recover in a teen specific facility, no matter what adult rehabs may say about their ability to handle patients of all ages (What Where to get teen drug treatment).

2) What is the level of family involvement?

Even while you child resides in a drug or alcohol rehab away from home you exert enormous influence, and parental involvement has been proven the single greatest influencing factor over the success of a teen in drug or alcohol rehab. Parental involvement cannot mean occasional phone calls, but should involve a committed and active participation in therapies and educational seminars within the rehab.

These whole family programs can help to heal the family, educate the family about the nature of addiction, and teach the family exactly how they can best support the recovering teen addict once back in the home.

Parental involvement is extremely important, and you should not consider a teen drug or alcohol rehab that does not feature a high level of family participation.

3) What type of academic program is offered?

Many teens enter into a rehab significantly behind in school. No teen using and abusing drugs does well in academically, and many teens in treatment need considerable remedial attention and one on one tutoring to catch up.

Rehab should never be a vacation from school, and teens need to fulfill their academic responsibilities while in treatment. The rehab should offer trained and experienced educators, able to manage classroom discipline and behavioral issues effectively.

Because the teacher to student ratio can be quite low, students have an excellent opportunity to benefit from individual instruction and catch up to or even surpass peers in conventional school.

4) How much aftercare is offered?

Rehab should never end with the completion of the residential phase of treatment, and equally important to long term success and sobriety is a lengthy participation in aftercare therapies. Aftercare may be group sessions, may be individual therapy and may be a continuation of 12 steps style meetings; and ideally it is a combination of these different therapies. Aftercare helps teens to consolidate and integrate the lessons of rehab when faced with the realities of temptation and real world challenges; and is extremely important for long term sobriety.

Better rehabs will offer a substantial level of aftercare therapy as inclusive in the price of admission, and you should be wary of any teen drug or alcohol rehab that does not promote aftercare after rehab.

By doing a bit of research and getting as much information as possible about the rehabs under consideration, you are in a much better position to choose a program that truly does offer the best treatments, and the best eventual chance of success.