Danny was one of those kids who didn’t fit neatly into any label or category. He had some social issues, but he did not have Asperger’s. He had some behavioral issues, but he did not have ADHD. He had mild learning and processing issues, but he was very bright and articulate, and did not have any specific learning disability. The best label the professionals could slap him with was PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder,-Not Otherwise Specified), which, in his case, was a way of saying, “There’s something wrong with this kid, but we don’t know what it is.” We sent him for every sort of therapy imaginable, and put him on medication intermittently, but it was like bailing water out of a leaky boat — no matter what we tried, it was never enough.

Danny reserved his worst behavior for us, his family. In school, he managed to perform decently, despite his scholastic and social issues, but when he came home, he let it all out, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde style. Ironically, when adults first met him they would often comment on how mature and well-spoken he was. Since he behaved relatively well outside the house, my wife Shifra and I were convinced that we were the problem. We consulted with experts and went for parenting courses and therapy, but no matter how many skills we acquired, we felt helpless trying to deal with Danny.

In one of his angry fits, he crushed my hat. Other times, he flung my tefillin, his shoes, and a bread knife across the room. Within five minutes of his entering a room where one of his siblings was, the other child would be screaming. He would invade their personal space, interrupt their homework, speak to them in a mocking, annoying, or inappropriate way, and sometimes hurt them by playing too rough. Yet he never actually broke anything valuable or harmed anyone seriously, so there was always a measure of control in his actions. Afterward, he’d act as if nothing had happened, and he could not understand why others were avoiding him.

It wasn’t only his rage that was problematic. He read our mail, listened in to our phone calls, and hacked through our parental controls on the computer. Once, on Yom Tov, he locked the rest of the family out of the house for a few hours.

We were raising four children, but 90 percent of our attention went to Danny. We could easily spend two hours trying to contain him during an outburst, as he ran around the house screaming and hitting and throwing things, while the other kids cowered in fear. We had to plan all of our family activities around Danny. If we go on a trip to the park, will he behave? If he melts down, how quickly can we turn around and get home? Is it safe to leave him home alone, or with the other kids, while I run out to the grocery?

If we told Danny we were going to do something, and plans didn’t work out exactly as we had said, he’d have a tantrum. “You promised me!” he’d yell. Then, he’d get stuck, and be unable to move forward. Anything we told him became etched in stone. But if we didn’t tell Danny what we were planning to do, he’d have a different type of meltdown, because he wasn’t adequately prepared for the situation. (We later learned that this rigidity was a symptom common in kids like him.)

When we weren’t actively trying to soothe Danny, Shifra and I were constantly planning how to deal with him and head off the next outburst. Often, Shifra wanted to take a softer approach, while I felt Danny needed more limits and consequences. The tension of having to run our lives around Danny, coupled with our frequent disagreements over how to handle him, drove a wedge between us. It didn’t help that Danny knew how to play us off each other and triangulate, by ingratiating himself with one parent and then turning that parent against the other.

By the time Danny was in eighth grade, he was starting to show signs of rebellion against Yiddishkeit: dropping his yarmulke, mocking tznius, and asking to attend public school.

Upon the advice of a noted chinuch expert, we enrolled him in a more modern high school that offered different levels of learning, extracurricular activities, and more relaxed standards of dress and behavior. But that just accelerated his drifting away from frumkeit. Wearing a yarmulke became optional for him, and he’d reach comfortably for non-kosher candies in a doctor’s waiting room.

At home, he would pretend to have no knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish concepts. On the rare occasions that he joined us at the Shabbos table, he would ask us for a piece of “that Jewish bread,” as though he had forgotten the word “challah.”

In high school, Danny started refusing to attend his therapy sessions, and stopped taking his meds. His violent outbursts became more frequent and more dangerous as he grew physically. Once, in his rage, he flipped over a couch. At times, he would hit me, or throw himself backward on one of the younger children, pretending he didn’t see them.

On several occasions, I had to wrestle Danny to the floor and pin him down, in order to get him under control. After one of these incidents, Danny called the police and claimed child abuse. Had he pressed charges, I could have been jailed.

His psychologist told me that it would be a good idea to hide the knives in our house, just in case. But it was our rav who took the situation most seriously. “Chananya, you must get your son out of the house, before there’s a murder.”

We wanted to send Danny to a frum wilderness program for kids at risk, but he refused to go, and the directors of the program said they couldn’t take a kid against his will. In any event, we were told by one of the program’s rabbanim that this setting would not be good for Danny, because it lasted only a few weeks, and was not targeted specifically to his issues. “In a frum program, your son will be lumped together with kids who use drugs, kids who have been abused, or kids who have psychiatric conditions,” the rav explained. “The frum world is too small to run separate programs, and a generalized program will not give him what he needs. Your son needs a 24/7 program, and there is nothing in the Jewish world for you.”

But what was the alternative?

“Utah,” the head of the frum wilderness program told me. “It’s where kids go if they’re too far gone for our program.”

The idea of sending 15-year-old Danny across the country, to a non-Jewish program, was anathema to us. But when we consulted with leading rabbanim, we were told that this is what we must do. “Your son has to be a mensch,” our rav told us. “First you work on getting him normal and sane. Then you work on getting him frum.”

We hired an educational consultant to help us find the right program for Danny, and he recommended a particular wilderness program that was all-male and focused on building confidence, responsibility, self-awareness, and self-control, while reducing anger.

We initially thought Danny would be away for six weeks. But this stretched into a four-month stint at the wilderness therapy program, at a cost of $55,000 out of pocket, followed by a stay at a residential treatment center (RTC) for almost two years — at a cost of $12,000 a month.?Initially, Shifra blanched at the price tag. “How are we going to come up with that kind of money?”

“We’ll mortgage our house, if we have to,” I said quietly. “What other choice do we have?”

(Actually, the steep price of these programs partially explains why they attract such a high percentage of Jewish kids. Who spends that amount of money to save their child? Rich people — and Jews, both frum and secular.)

Neither our health insurance plan nor our Board of Education covered the expenses of either the wilderness program or the RTC — although some plans do — but thankfully, Shifra’s parents stepped up to the plate and willingly paid most of the program costs.

The worst day of our lives was when the “transporters” — aka professional kidnappers — came to our house to escort Danny to Utah. Shifra became physically ill that day, and we both fought back tears.

When I made the arrangements with the head transporter, he asked a whole bunch of questions. “Does your son have any knives or weapons? Does he know martial arts? How tall, heavy, and strong is he? Is he taking illegal drugs?”

I asked what would happen if Danny would refuse to board the plane. “Then we’ll drive him,” he said calmly.

“You’re going to drive all the way to Utah?” I asked, incredulous. “How long does that take?”

“Thirty-two hours,” he said. “But don’t worry — usually, by the time we get to about Pittsburgh, the kids get bored in the car and ask to go by plane.”

To our surprise, Danny did not put up a fuss, and the transporters did not use any physical force to escort him out of our house. (I later learned that they are trained in de-escalation and mediation and do their job purely with words.)

We sent our son, in the dead of winter, to the Utah wilderness, where he would sleep under tarps, in a lean-to, in a snow shelter, and in the open. He would not see a bed for months.

Every day, the program leaders would take a group of eight boys, including Danny and another frum boy, through the various terrains of Utah. State regulations require that the kids be observed drinking a certain amount of water every day and brushing their teeth twice a day. Three times a day, there was a “boot check,” in which the boys’ feet were examined to ensure they were dry and not cold. Hearing about these rigid in loco parentis procedures made my stomach churn, even as I felt relief that they were in place.

We corresponded with Danny the old-fashioned way: through letters. Ours were typed and printed out for him, while his handwritten ones were scanned and sent to us. We spoke with his on-site therapist every week, and later on, he joined part of the conversation. Shifra and I had “homework” assignments from the wilderness program, which including reading some of the same books as our son, such as Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict.

In his letters, he complained bitterly that he was cold, that there was no toilet paper, that they weren’t letting him put on tefillin (actually, they were). We braced ourselves for much worse; one of the mechanchim who advised us to send him to Utah correctly predicted that Danny would falsely claim he was being mistreated or abused, in order to manipulate us to bring him home.

“What will we do then?” Shifra had asked worriedly.

“Nothing,” the mechanech said. “You must leave him there until the end.”

For the first month of the program, Danny was miserable. It was torture to hear him complain about the difficult conditions and beg us to take him home, while promising us the moon in terms of his future behavior. But after the first month, he acclimated to his new environment, and his complaints became less frequent and less intense.

At one point during the wilderness program, Danny had a meltdown at the top of a mountain, and flung his helmet over a cliff. That was a watershed moment, because it showed us — and him — that we were not the ones responsible for his anger.

He could no longer blame his parents, his yeshivah, or Yiddishkeit in general for whatever had gone wrong to trigger his rage. Out there in the mountains of Utah, he was forced to confront himself — and recognize that he alone was responsible for his behavior.

In the wilderness program, Danny went from being a whiner who lacked self-direction to being a young man who possessed confidence in his own ability to survive and take responsibility. He learned to use a compass and a map to lead others through the wilderness, and he gained the corresponding faith in himself.

The wilderness program was not only therapeutic, but also diagnostic: feedback from on-site therapists guided our educational consultants to help us choose his next placement.

It was tempting to bring him home after the wilderness program, but experts warned us that the effects of the program would wear off quickly unless it was followed by an RTC, in which Danny would experience total therapeutic immersion and re-learn how to manage all aspects of his life. The 24/7 experience, which integrates school, home life, therapy and experiential recreation, creates a holistic environment in which kids learn communication skills, respect of self and others, self-advocacy, responsibility to self and to community, and leadership. His RTC included the added pluses of equine (horse) therapy and gardening.

At the RTC, Danny was taught to recognize his personal signs of imminent trouble: stalking, anxiety, pressured speech, yelling, racing thoughts. Once he knew what was happening to him, he could self-soothe through outdoor physical activity, take rescue medication (sedatives), call a therapist for help, or use other coping skills.

Danny earned his high school diploma at the RTC, learned to drive, and began doing homework independently — something he never managed to do with us. (Homework had always been a huge battle, even after we hired tutors to help him.)

While Danny’s stay in Utah reduced the stress in our home considerably, it also added new pressures, since we had a slew of obligations to him in Utah, including weekly Skype therapy sessions and quarterly visits. We had a parent meeting in Utah before Hurricane Sandy, and we rushed back to beat the storm so we could be with our other kids. We could only find flights to Rochester, however, and after we landed, we had to rent a car and race through the rain to get home. A different time, we had to travel on Taanis Esther and break our fast in Chicago’s airport. I leined the Megillah myself for the first time, and we spent a lonely Purim out in Utah, while our supportive neighbors and extended family helped with our younger kids.

Even with Danny away, we were so busy with him that our younger daughter complained, “Danny isn’t even here anymore, and you still give him more time than me!”

With encouragement from the RTC staff, we began to take each one of our kids with us to the family retreats, where they participated in recreation therapy sessions geared at improving sibling relationships.

After two years at the RTC, Danny returned home a new person: polite, helpful, responsible, and respectful. He was still not observant, but he was much less antagonistic toward Judaism and more tolerant of us and our chosen lifestyle.

After he turned 18, Danny enrolled in a regular college, which was probably a mistake. Although he had made great strides in his organizational skills, study habits, and executive functioning, he still was not ready for the intense demands of a full-day college program. Once, in his distress, he pulled a carving knife and laid it on his arm, as if threatening to hurt himself.

That time, we had to call Hatzolah and take him to the psychiatric emergency room, where he was promptly released. Thankfully, that was an isolated incident.

Later, Danny transferred to a college designed for students with learning and behavioral issues. That was a much better match for him.

Today, he is a college senior, and plans to become a psychologist or a social worker so he can, in turn, help troubled youth. In the summers and during school breaks he works with special-needs kids and thrives in that capacity. He maintains close contact with us, although his relationship with his siblings still causes a lot of tension. He has bad days here and there, but those are nothing like the episodes of rage he had before he went to Utah, and we no longer fear for his safety or that of his siblings.

Danny occasionally initiates discussion of hashkafah and halachah with me, and he won’t let us give away his tefillin. I think he has reached a place of maturity where he recognizes that the difficulties he experienced growing up were not because of religion, and were not our fault, either. Shifra and I have finally stopped blaming ourselves for Danny’s problems, and today, we can acknowledge the parenting mistakes we made without excoriating ourselves — or each other.

Danny’s ongoing journey has been a bittersweet saga for Shifra and me. While we are delighted that he is a mensch, we are saddened that he is not yet shomer mitzvos. Having sent a child to Utah, we can understand what “k’racheim av al banim” means — and we have an inkling of how Hashem yearns for each one of His children to return to His loving embrace.

The narrator can be contacted through LifeLines or the Mishpacha office

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 629)