First comes Wediko's meticulous selection and matching of children, which compose each child's living group. Next comes Wediko's comprehensive therapeutic milieu. This highly structured environment is protective, facilitating, limit-setting psychologically safe, containing, and above all, nurturing. From the child's perspective, Wediko is camp, with all the activities and outlets that make camp one of the most enjoyable experiences of childhood. The therapeutic activity program offered at Wediko is so attractive, so normalizing, so motivating that it is the exceptional case where the child is not stimulated to awaken dormant interests and develop new ones.
   Nurturing, guiding, containing relationships re found in every nook and cranny at Wediko. The 2:1 staff to child/ratio not only insures supervision but the availability of achieving special personal bonds, which provide a secure base for exploration, fun and problem solving. Not enough can be said about these anchoring relationships which typically facilitate the verbal expression of needs (using words instead of actions), building mutual conversation and promoting appropriate risk-taking.
   Most of Wediko's children are success deprived in one or more spheres of their functioning (family, sense of self, academic achievement and participation in community life). Accordingly, Wediko is structured to control failure, facilitate success ad provide incentives which motivate purposive behavior. It is extremely difficult for a day to pass at Wediko where most every child has not been exposed to some form of success. Said differently, it's hard not to be successful at Wediko.
   And with the experience of success come the expectation of future success and the sense of well being that only success can bring.
   It is important to note that Wediko does not shield children from failure because children must learn to surmount obstacles that block their path. However, the positive feedback that continuously surrounds each child regarding expenditure of effort, trying and partial success begins to build heartiness and encourages the child to "bounce back" no matter what. At Wediko, the place of the endless "second chance", purposive effort and perseverance are always recognized and validated.
   The "endless" second chance is also mirrored in the child's group experience. Because of Wediko's core belief that children's growth will be stalled out or set in reverse by the lack of psychological safety, the Summer Program goes the extra mile in assuring the psychological safety of each child and all of the children's groupings. Accordingly, the concept of safety and its behavioral ramifications are discussed from the moment the child sets foot in the Summer Program. When basic safety tenants are periodically disregarded by the children, immediate behavior management strategies unfold, Children quickly learn that a Wediko, safety is not a buzz word and that graded logical consequences immediately come into play to prevent or contain any and all breeches of safety. In such a fashion, children are held accountable for their behavior and receive continuous feedback about their functioning which tend to promote more effective self-monitoring and self-control.
   All Wediko children attend daily group meetings structured to enhance verbal exchange, identification of problematic issues, and give-and-take problem -solving. These meetings are extremely important in the Wediko scheme of things since the children actively encounter conflict and other interpersonal issues of importance to them. Without this vibrant group context, there would be little opportunity to acquire new levels of social reasoning, interpersonal skill and self-control in relation to peers.
   Wediko's summer school also contributes to each child's progress. A highly attractive science experiment curriculum is implemented with the following objectives: maintaining academic involvement, curtailing achievement loss and expanding the child's science knowledge base. Important from an educational perspective, is the school's focus on classroom behavior and habits that maximize learning n all academic settings.
   Wediko differs from many children's with its core assumption that symptoms must be viewed as barriers to developing competency. From this perspective problems are never the primary focus. Building a broad range of adaptive capabilities is the first and foremost challenge. Such an orientation emphasizes containing problematic behaviors through cognitive-behavioral interventions and medication when indicated so that inherent strengths can be utilized for higher-order coping. This approach assures new levels of skill acquisition, self-regulation and self-sufficiency. It is Wediko's view that, positive outcomes occur when the child's identity no longer centers around problems but instead is organized around effort, capacity to learn, competency, and connection to others. This explains why children typically say that Wediko was the hardest thing they have ever done but also the most fun.
   Children characteristically leave the Summer Program with their emotions more integrated into their thinking and choice-making. Expectations of success have increased, as has the courage to try out new activities and problem-solve conflict. After a Wediko summer stay, children are inclined to be more verbal, more self- observant, more related to others and more receptive to input.
   Without question, the thousands upon thousands of corrective repetitions across a variety of contexts are responsible for these shifts in functioning. In the course of the summer, each child will receive about 600 hours of therapeutic input from staff, activity specialists and educators. This input builds on itself as the child's adaptive capacities are gradually restored. We assume that the all-enveloping cocoon of therapeutic input interfacing with emerging levels of increasingly successful conduct, establishes new neural connections. Its these developing neural networks that we suppose transfer out of Wediko to the home and back into the school given the presence of essential family and school supports.

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