Before You Pay for a Programme

Tick only what you have actually established, not what you have been told in a sales call and not what the website implies. Where a line says in writing, it means an email you could forward to somebody else.

Why is this framed as what you have not established?

Because that is the only honest output. A checklist cannot tell you whether a programme is any good, whether it will help your child, or whether the money is well spent. It can tell you which of the things that go wrong afterwards are still unknown to you now, while you can still do something about them.

There is no score on this page and there will not be one. Thirty of thirty-four ticked is not a grade. It is thirty answered questions and four unanswered ones, and the four unanswered ones are where the trouble lives. A number would compress that into something reassuring, and the compression would destroy the only information the list contains.

Look at what you have left blank. That is the page’s result.

Which two lines are worth doing first?

Acceptance, asked of the person who has to accept it. Not the seller. A programme’s claim to be court-approved or school-approved is marketing copy, and it is not binding on anyone. Once you have paid, you have lost both the money and the leverage, and the deadline has not moved. This is the single most expensive thing on the list to get wrong, and it is covered in full on court-ordered anger management for a minor.

The cancellation window. These are usually short and are often counted from the date of enrolment rather than from the first session, which means the window can close before anyone has sat in a room. It is the other item that expires.

Everything else on the list can be established a week late. Those two cannot.

Why are there questions about what gets reported?

Because it surprises people afterwards, and because it should be settled before your teenager says anything to anyone.

Programmes differ in what they pass back to a parent, what they send to a court or a school, and what they keep. So do clinicians. This site will not tell you what any particular arrangement is, because it varies by provider, by state and by who is paying, and a page that guessed would be guessing about your family. The question has a real answer and the way to get it is to ask for it in plain words before enrolment. What happens at a first appointment sets out how to ask that of a clinician, with your teenager in the room rather than behind their back.

Why does the last band exist at all?

Because a teenager refusing to go is not an unusual outcome, and almost no programme’s sales page mentions it.

The money is normally committed at enrolment and the attendance is not. If a court requirement is attached, a stopped programme is also a deadline problem, and deadline problems are much easier to solve early than late. Asking these five questions before enrolling costs one email. Discovering the answers in week four costs the fee and the weeks.

The last line in that band is the one people skip. Telling a teenager they have been enrolled in something is not the same as asking them, and a programme booked without a word to the person who has to attend it starts at a disadvantage no curriculum will recover.

Where these questions come from

The credentials and curriculum lines come from the fact that anger management is not a protected term, not a licensed profession and not a standard product, which is worked through in what anger management classes actually are. The questions about practice and homework come from the research on cognitive behavioural work with young people, where the ingredients associated with larger effects were being shown a skill, practising it and being told how you did, and where programmes without a practice component came out at the bottom of the range. That is treatment research rather than a finding about the class market, and does anger management actually work sets out what it does and does not cover.

The acceptance and proof-of-completion lines come from how juvenile case processing actually works, where practice varies from community to community and the person holding the requirement is the person who decides what satisfies it.

And if you have not yet decided whether to buy anything at all, that question comes before this list rather than after it. Do you actually need professional help is written on the assumption that for a good many families the answer is no, or not yet.