The mother–child relationship is essential in the development of a healthy child, who cangrow up trusting his/her own perceptions and understanding of the social environment.Teenagers naturally experience a period of transition in search of their own identity asindividuals, thus being really exposed and vulnerable to being recruited by jihadists. Inthis particular stage of development, the teenager tries to free himself/herself from thetutorship of the family and looks to experience something new outside the family frame. Oneof the defining characteristics of this stage is a tendency to take things to an extreme andto see things in black and white, while emotions are experienced as very intense,overwhelming and sometimes difficult to control. Teenagers are easy to impress, convince andmanipulate, especially by their social milieu outside the family of origin. In the caseswhen the relationship with the family of origin becomes tensed – whether the child has beenneglected or spoiled during childhood, or when there are tensions between parents or thefamily is conflicting – the teenager looks for validation outside the family environment.Any opportunity to do something out of the ordinary and apparently easy to accomplish mightseem attractive for this category of individuals, especially for those that do not enjoyfamily support. The illusion of becoming famous or the attraction of glamour might seemdesirable at this age. This is one of the main reasons why Jihad has hadsuch a significant impact on Western converts to Islam. Therefore, the aim of this study isto provide an analysis of the case of Boicea Luigi Constantin (Umar al Rumaani), a Romanianthat adhered to the extremist ideology of the Islamic State, who does not come from a Muslimfamily, yet underwent a fast self-radicalization process. In order to better understandBoicea’s case, we will try to present the result of the investigation conducted on thefamily environment, his interests manifested at an early age, and the tragic events thatcontributed to his radicalization; in other words, we will try to present the generalcontext in which self-radicalization occurred.