“We Were Too Late—But Not Too Late to Begin Again”

A mother’s story of confronting radicalization, incarceration, and healing

I thought he was just becoming more religious.

Our son was home during the pandemic, like so many kids. He started getting more serious about Islam. At first, we tried to support it. But then it became more intense. He started policing what we ate, what we watched, how we dressed. It didn’t feel like faith—it felt like control.

We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t even know what we were seeing.

Then came the phone call.

The FBI had arrested him. He was on his way to Yemen after pledging allegiance to a terrorist group. He was just a teenager. And he was gone.

I didn’t know how to breathe.

We found out he’d secretly gotten married. That he’d been planning this for months. We didn’t see it coming. Not because the signs weren’t there—but because we didn’t know how to read them.

That’s when we found Parents for Peace.

They helped us stop asking, “What happened to our son?” and start asking, “What was he missing that made him so vulnerable?” They worked with us to understand our family—our communication breakdowns, our inconsistent parenting, our silence around things that should have been said.

And they worked with him too. Even while he was incarcerated.

Two of their team—one of them a former extremist himself—started meeting with our son. Again and again. Over 50 sessions. They didn’t argue with him. They listened. They asked questions. They helped him trace his beliefs back to his pain: the loneliness, the confusion, the feeling of not belonging. They helped him name the things that ideology had disguised.

At the same time, we were being coached. How to talk to him. How to stop debating and start connecting. How to show love in a way that made it harder for hate to grow.

And slowly, it worked.

He started asking his own questions. He picked up books. He started exercising. He looked inward instead of lashing out. He even talked about how our parenting had shaped some of his pain—not to blame us, but to understand it.

We know he’s still healing. So are we. But something has shifted.

We didn’t just get our son back. We found our way back to each other.