There’s scant help — and loads of shame — for parents whose children hit them, kick them, and even threaten their lives.
One spring afternoon in 2022, Leslie was home alone in Park Slope with her 15-year-old son, Hunter. She asked him to clean his room, or take a shower, or something innocuous — she can’t remember exactly.
He viewed her request as too demanding and flew into a. As he lunged for her, she sprinted into the bathroom and locked the door. He tried to kick it down while she sat on the closed toilet lid and stared at her phone, debating whether to call 911. Leslie, who asked that she and her son go by pseudonyms, had reason to be afraid.
Her son is a full head taller than her, not including the shock of curly brown hair. In a previous conflict, he had punched her in the face so hard that he broke her glasses; on another occasion, he had verbally threatened her life. Ultimately, she couldn’t bring herself to call the police for fear that they might shoot Hunter if he didn’t comply with their orders.
“I decided to risk him hurtinginstead,” she said. Hunter eventually wore himself out, but Leslie stayed inside the bathroom until her husband came home, just in case. It had taken about a decade for Leslie and Hunter to reach such a dangerous dynamic. A brainy kid who enjoys drawing and, he first exhibited behavioral issues at his gifted school in first grade.
By the time he was in middle school, he started going after Leslie, and she began getting calls from his teacher almost daily to pick him up after a meltdown.
“His IQ is off the charts, but his executive functioning is so low,” explained Leslie. “When he felt the pressure of demands being put on him, he would lose it. ” She would have to physically drag him out of the school building as he kicked and screamed because, although he didn’t want to stay there, he also didn’t want to go with her.
“I had to have people help me,” she recalled. “It was so embarrassing and so hard. ” Parenting a child who is physically violent is a uniquely isolating experience, cloaked in stigma and with few resources for support.
“Aggression toward parents remains underresearched and largely overlooked,” said, associate professor in psychology at the University of Zurich and a co-author of a recent study into the phenomenon. She said this likely stems from the size disparity between the aggressor and their target; the physical danger posed to adults by children is assumed to be relatively mild — bruises, scratches, bite marks. But children grow, of course. And even when they are small, the emotional toll on parents is severe.
If anyone else in their life were physically injuring them, most adults would leave the relationship, but a parent can’t abandon their own child. It’s a warped dynamic that puts parents in the position of having to care for their attacker.
“It was such a horrific situation to be in,” said Leslie. “I’m thinking,I shouldn’t even be thinking that. I have to love my child, but I don’t want to anymore. He’s trying to hurt meAfter the bathroom incident, Leslie contemplated moving out of her family home for her own safety.
Instead, she and her husband made the difficult decision to send Hunter away to a wilderness program, not just for his own sake but also for the safety of his older sister and younger brother. Now, at age 19, he still doesn’t live at home, given his volatile behavior, but he doesn’t yet have the faculties to be unsupervised.
He attends a residential program in a neighboring state, and, even though he’s over age 18, Leslie is still responsible for picking him up if his behavior becomes unmanageable; there’s no safety plan for her on the ride home or during her son’s home visit.
“At what point does it become his responsibility and not mine? ” she asked hypothetically, because there is no answer to her question.
“I want my life back. ” A few months before the bathroom encounter, Hunter told his therapist that his mother had thrown a chair at him, and a social worker from the Administration for Children’s Services came to investigate, explaining that she was there to ensure the child’s safety. Leslie clarified that the chair incident hadn’t happened the way her son described it and that she was actually the one who needed protection from him, not vice versa.
An ACS supervisor replied, “That’s not our department. ” Turns out there is no department for that. , allegedly at the hands of their son, Nick Reiner, made national news because of the family’s high profile — but for parents of aggressive children, it also brought their greatest and most private fears into the public realm, even though there’s no guarantee that violent behavior in childhood will lead to a violent act as an adult.
In online forums like Reddit and Facebook Groups, where contributors can hide behind anonymity, the tragedy spurred some, for the first time, to discuss their fear of their own children, lament the lack of institutional support, and grieve together for the joyful parenting journey they had dreamed about but never experienced.
For some parents whose kids struggle with mental illness, the answer to whether the fate of the Reiners could ever befall their own family is simple and devastating: They can’t know.about two-thirds of toddlers exhibit aggressive behavior toward their mothers. This type of behavior is considered age-appropriate in 2-to-4-year-olds, and most children outgrow it as they learn to manage their emotions and figure out other ways to get their needs met.
But others don’t.a senior psychologist and associate clinical director at the Child Mind Institute’s Anxiety Disorders Center, estimated that 10 to 20 percent of older children and adolescents exhibit aggressive behavior and theorizes that violence aimed at parents specifically is on the rise because children are spending more time with their parents as the “village” approach to caregiving has fallen away. Also, as parenting styles have become less authoritative, children feel freer to be aggressive at home, whereas schools have become less tolerant of roughhousing, she adds.
CAPA First Response. She has specialized in helping parents deal with this predicament for 17 years. Her organization’s research has found that this behavior spikes at three points — ages 6, 8, and 12 — partially because this is when children experience big shifts and new pressures in school.
Some kids, she said, manage to control themselves outside the house and then explode when they get home, often at their parents. She said that when these parents bring up the problem to their child’s teachers and are told that the child is well behaved and calm in the classroom, it at times inadvertently reinforces the shame and blame that parents feel — and can stop them seeking support for up to ten years.
“We need to take away parental blame and look at it more systematically,” said Griffiths, who believes social workers and teachers should receive special training to support parents whose children are aggressive toward them.that Shanahan co-authored on child-to-parent aggression tracked around 1,500 participants starting from age 11 to 24. It found that more than 15 percent of 13-year-olds report aggressive incidents toward their parents, such as throwing objects, hitting, or kicking.
“This is often a transient phenomenon,” explained Shanahan, with most parents reporting that it happened only once as “early adolescents are asserting more independence and renegotiating their relationship with their parents. ” Still, the teens who exhibited physical aggression toward their parents were more likely to have engaged in such behavior when they were younger.
“Once a pattern is established, it is harder to break,” she said. The behavior decreased from there, plateauing at around 5 percent in early adulthood — which Shanahan described as a “concern.
” The risk factors for child-against-parent violence include “poor conflict coping skills ; harsh parenting, which both models aggressive behavior and can create an escalatory dynamic at home; serious victimization outside of the family; and ADHD symptoms, which make impulse regulation more difficult and have also been linked with increased conflict within the family,” she said. She also emphasized that many of these factors can be addressed with early intervention and parent counseling.
Katie’s daughter Sarah started showing aggression toward her parents at 4 years old.
“She has always manifested more rage than appropriate for her age and circumstance,” said Katie, who asked that she and her daughter go by pseudonyms. Sarah, now 7 years old, is in first grade at a Westchester public school, where her teachers give her glowing reports. But at home, she has been overtaken by violent outbursts directed at her parents, which Sarah herself described as like “being in the middle of a tornado.
” Counterintuitively, psychologists say children go after their parents because they feel safest with them. In order to reinforce that close bond and reassure their children that they are there for them, many parents willingly subject themselves to the physical attacks.
“I let her beat me up as much as I could handle,” said Katie. “I was just so sad for her. I could see in her eyes she was completely out of sorts. ” One night when leaving a birthday party for the drive home, Sarah, already buckled into her car seat, flew into a violent rage at her mother for taking away a stuffed animal that didn’t belong to her.
She was biting, slapping, and kicking, as if she were a trapped animal clawing for freedom. Katie was seated next to her in the back seat of the car, trying to defend herself from her daughter’s assault while also trying to prevent her from unfastening her seat belt as the car sped along the New Jersey Turnpike.
“There was nowhere for me to go,” recalled Katie. “I was crying. My older daughter, sitting on the other side of me, was crying. My husband was trying to drive.
It was one of the worst days of my whole life. ” Sarah finally tired herself out after about 30 minutes and calmed down, but her family was shaken. Although there were no lasting signs of physical injury from Sarah’s attacks, the psychological damage was significant.
“I felt such deep despair,” said Katie, “like,. ” At night after Sarah had finally gone to bed, Katie would sob and scroll online trying to figure out what was wrong with her daughter. She questioned all of her and her husband’s parenting decisions to try to find the cause of Sarah’s behavior. Was it because they sleep-trained her?
Did they send her to day care too early?
“We thought it was our fault, rather than a part of who she is or a phase of life she was going through,” said Katie. And then, of course, there were the unspoken questions: Is the behavior ever going to get better — or will it get worse? , said that “explosive” children all share a few common traits: inflexibility, low frustration tolerance, inability to regulate emotions, and lack of problem-solving skills.
If these children are attacking their parents, said Greene, the parents are likely placing expectations on them that they are having difficulty meeting — even just simple, everyday demands, like doing their homework or going to bed. One unhelpful suggestion that some parents receive is to have the child punch a pillow, but this assumes the child has control over the impulse to lash out. In those moments they are in flight-or-flight mode and cannot be reasoned with, Griffiths explained.
Most kids can handle the tasks that their parents present to them, but “explosive” kids simply don’t have the tools. Greene wrote in his book that these children are commonly characterized as “manipulative” and “attention-seeking,” while their parents are regarded as “permissive” and “inept. ” “There’s a lot of blaming parents going around,” said Greene.
“If, as a parent, you believe what society is telling you, you’re going to feel like you’re failing your kid. ” The combination of shame and blame that parents feel often deters them from getting help. Many live in hope that their child will outgrow the problem, and they view seeking support as an admission that something is really wrong. It’s also not easy to find the right kind of help, which might cause some parents to give up trying.
Many turn to Facebook groups looking for advice and resources from other parents. Google searches don’t lead to much that’s helpful, perhaps because there is no common terminology to describe the phenomenon. Amazon searches surface books for parents on how to control theiranger, which feeds into the shame. And many parents are too embarrassed to admit what is happening to other parents, leading to a lack of community.
“I felt guilt and shame in talking about it with other people,” said Katie. “Nobody knew the depths of it, particularly the violence toward us at home. ” “A lot of parents we speak to are exhausted from being judged,” said Griffiths, “and from avoiding family members and friends. ” Katie and her husband tried all the tactics recommended to them by their pediatrician and that they could find online.
They bought Sarah a punching bag, but she never used it. When she was in the midst of a violent meltdown, they would utter gentle-parenting phrases like, “I can’t let you hit me,” or, “I know you’re having big feelings,” but those only enraged her further. They learned to wait it out and not try to reason with her.
“She was clearly manifesting emotions beyond her ability to deal with them and her understanding of them,” said Katie. “It was beyond my understanding, too. ” Whitehouse recommends that parents facing these challenges pursue evidence-based therapy, such as Parent-Child Interaction Therapy or Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, a program developed by Greene.
Although these approaches were not designed to specifically treat child-against-parent aggression, they’re effective in teaching parents the tools they need to support their children and teaching kids how to recognize their emotions and experience them safely.
“Regular parenting tactics, like relying on consequences and sticker charts, don’t get to the driver of the behavior,” said Griffiths. Katie ultimately found the support Sarah needed at the Columbia University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. A social worker engaged Sarah in talk therapy and play therapy and deduced that she suffers from extreme separation anxiety. Without the skills to manage it and the words to communicate it, she resorted to violence.
Since she ended treatment a year ago, Sarah hasn’t had any episodes, but Katie still remains fearful for her future, especially when it comes to significant life transitions, like going to college.
“No one prepares you for having a kid you can’t deal with,” said Leslie. On a daily basis, she cycles through a range of emotions about her son’s violent behavior: sadness, anger, guilt, embarrassment, and, recently, hope. He’s starting college this fall and plans to study engineering.
“When do I stop feeling bad about this, that I didn’t raise him right, that I have something to do with it? ” she asked.
“I want to not have this. I want to not be heartbroken. ”Trump was supposed to be forging a “big tent” party. Rushing to wipe out Black representation in Congress won’t help.
In a small way, he is attempting to alter a dynamic that has held New York mayors captive for decades. After the WHCD shooting, it seemed like a good idea to market Trump’s ballroom as a security imperative. Now it’s a politically dangerous boondoggle. The Transportation secretary says he did manage to do “some work” while driving his family across the country for a Trump-approved reality show.
The CDC is planning to evacuate and quarantine the remaining Americans aboard. Dozens of other people are being monitored for symptoms worldwide. The state court just threw out Virginia’s voter-approved congressional map, upending the midterms redistricting fight in the Republicans’ favor. If concerns about living costs are indeed the key to the midterms, Trump and his party are in deep trouble.
Did a judge put construction on hold? What’s in the bunker? How could it cost taxpayers $1 billion? Is Trump paying a cent?
Here’s everything we know. Prediction markets are growing fast, have allies in government, and promise to democratize finance. The public sees them as gambling. It’s been a hellish time for travel, but one airline is winning by catering to the elite.
Good luck to everyone stuck in coach. You can tell because Trump’s pastor friend said of the new statue at the Doral golf course, “Let me be clear: This is not a golden calf. ”Katie Porter is a U.S. representative with lefty street cred. Tom Steyer is a billionaire “class traitor.
” Who’s the left’s best bet? Ted Turner placed a series of big bets on a nascent TV industry — and reshaped pop culture along the way. Disapproval of his performance as president is now pervasive across nearly every issue, and he’s particularly unpopular with independents. Southern Republicans mulling how much to gerrymander their states got a reminder of what could happen if they defy the president’s will.
The president defended the higher price tag of his planned White House ballroom amid reports that Congress is seeking $1 billion toward the project. New York
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
'Dark money' casts a shadow over L.A. elections, with mystery group pumping out attack mail'Neighbors First' is targeting left-wing candidates in the L.A. City Council race. As a nonprofit, it doesn't have to reveal the source of its funding.
Read more »
Ex-Olympics security boss warns Iranian 'sleeper cells' likely plotting World Cup attackToday's Video Headlines: 05/07/26
Read more »
Russell Wilson Praises Wife Ciara in Matching Designer Family Fits for Mothers' DayThe New York Giants quarterback celebrates the mother of his kids in a special way.
Read more »
Padres closer Mason Miller hopes to be a ‘resource,’ inspiration for kids living with Type 1 diabetesOn Saturday at Petco Park, Miller met with eight kids living with Type 1 diabetes.
Read more »