Jessie Cappis said Youth Dynamics Inc. might have been her family’s saving grace — not from outside forces, but from tearing itself apart.

“When I first heard about the program, I was like why haven’t I heard of this before?” she said. “It was kind of like a family-saver.”

Cappis and her two boys, Travis Greene, 14, and Corbin Greene, 9, and stepfather Ray Cappis were living in a tinderbox.

“There were constant, unnecessary battles in the house,” Ray said. “We all just escalated the situation instead of trying to deal with it other ways.”

They heard about Youth Dynamics last fall.

Youth Dynamics is a Montana-based nonprofit that provides therapeutic support to families of children with  severe emotional disturbances. The organization has 15 locations around the state as well as 10 therapeutic group homes for wards of the state.

Jessica Curry, area manager for Kalispell and Libby, said the nonprofit has served children from birth through 18 years old since 1981.

“We work at providing comprehensive and behavioral health services,” she said. “We have a variety of services: Outpatient therapy, we can also do family therapy, case management, a family support team and a family support assistant.” 

The Cappis/Greene family has made use of many of these services, particularly the family support assistant.

“The boys both have an FSA who comes and takes the kids out to work on social stuff,” Jessie said. 

“It’s kind of like a Big Brother/Big Sister thing,” Ray said. “They get to do fun things while hanging out with someone who they can talk to.”

Corbin, the younger of the children, especially enjoys the excursions out of the home.

“I got to go to the walking park the last time we went out,” he said. “By the baseball fields [the Kidsports Complex] there is this pavement path that I went down on my scooter. It was pretty fun.”

Visits to the library — where, as Corbin said it, Travis gets to go to the “second floor” where the young adult  section is — and trips to the mall are all simple interactions Youth Dynamics’ family support assistants can do to improve the experience of the Greene boys.

The family has warmed up to the idea now, but at first it was a tough sell for the boys.

“Corbin has responded pretty well,” Ray said. “But Travis was pretty resistant. He was saying we sounded like robots.”

Instead of escalation, the Cappis’ are now using newly learned parenting tactics to defuse potentially explosive situations.

“We were identifying behaviors that were happening and we weren’t responding correctly to,” he said. “Now we communicate what they are doing and why we want them to stop rather than just say ‘stop doing that.’”

Youth Dynamics offers a “common sense parenting” course that allows parents to take skills they know should be working and apply them to their children in an easily communicable way.

Other resources at the organization include a medication manager and nurse practitioner. Curry said she employs eight people in the Kalispell office and three in Libby. Youth Dynamics sees nearly 60 children in Northwest Montana. 

For the Cappis and Greene family, things have improved markedly in just a few months.

“Things are just not as stressful,” Ray said. “They’ve turned it all around. School used to be a chore. Now they are doing all their homework 100 percent of the time. At first we thought things were going kind of slow, but they’ve helped us so much.”

Youth Dynamics is a nonprofit, and many of the clients use Medicaid or private insurance to pay for the service, but Curry said a sliding fee scale based on income is available as well.

For more information, call the organization at 751-8017

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Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at [email protected].