The Parents Living in Fear of Their Own Children

Parents who live with a violent, explosive child: “No one prepares you for this”

It took about 10 years for Leslie and her husband to decide that removing their teenage son, Hunter, from the family home was the safest option for him — and her.

Since early childhood, he’d displayed creativity and high intelligence alongside a tendency toward explosion when displeased.

“His IQ is off the charts, but his executive functioning is so low,” Leslie told New York Magazine, requesting the use of pseudonyms to protect their identity. “When he felt the pressure of demands being put on him, he would lose it,” she said, recalling that by middle school she had to retrieve him early from school nearly every day following a meltdown. 

Things came to a head one day when the two of them were home alone. Leslie asked Hunter, then 15, to clean his room or take a shower — she can’t even remember which because of how basic the request was. He responded so violently that she had to lock herself in the bathroom for safety.

She debated calling 911 but ultimately didn’t, fearing that officers might shoot Hunter if he failed to comply with their orders. “I decided to risk him hurting me instead,” she said.

Soon after, Leslie and her husband decided to enroll Hunter in a wilderness program away from the family home and to keep their other two children safe. Now 19, Hunter remains at an out-of-state residential program and, due to his behavior, is still not able to live unsupervised. 

“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.” 

Child-against-parent aggression is more common than many people realize — and far less visible than it should be. A recent long-term study published in European Child + Adolescent Psychiatry found that around 15% of 13-year-olds in its dataset have hit, kicked or thrown objects at a parent.

Psychologist Sandra Whitehouse, associate clinical director of the Child Mind Institute’s Anxiety Disorder Center, estimates that between 10% and 20% of older children and adolescents exhibit aggressive behavior.

Still, the behavior remains “underresearched and largely overlooked,” says psychologist Lilly Shanahan, an associate professor at the University of Zurich and co-author of the study, because people assume the children pose little physical danger to adults. But children grow, and the emotional toll of such attacks on parents is severe.

Moreover, resources for parents navigating the issue are hard to find. There is no common terminology for the phenomenon, which makes searching for help feel like looking for something without a name. Google searches return books on managing parental anger.

The institutional gaps are stark: When a social worker investigated reports that Hunter was being subjected to physical abuse only to learn that Leslie was the one who needed protection from her son, the response was swift and indifferent. “That’s not our department,” Leslie was told. Turns out, there is no department for it.

Shame exacerbates the problem by keeping it hidden. Parents who are being hurt by their own children rarely speak about it. They may even avoid friends and family, turning to the internet, scrolling for answers that don’t come.

“I felt guilt and shame in talking about it with other people,” said Katie, a pseudonymous Westchester mother whose 7-year-old daughter began showing violent outbursts at age 4. “Nobody knew the depths of it, particularly the violence toward us at home.” 

The situation can be especially tough to navigate when children maintain control over their emotions in public only to lash out when no one else is around. A mainstream culture that blames parents entirely for the behavior compounds the shame.

Clinical psychologist Ross Greene, author of The Explosive Child, says he’s seen it play out for years. Aggressive children get labeled “manipulative,” while their parents are called “permissive” and “inept.” 

“There’s a lot of blaming parents going around,” he said. “If, as a parent, you believe what society is telling you, you’re going to feel like you’re failing your kid.”

There are, however, reasons for hope. Evidence-based therapies like Parent-Child Interaction Therapy and Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, a program developed by Greene, may help families interrupt these cycles.

For Katie, the turning point came when her daughter was treated at the Columbia University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, where play therapy revealed severe separation anxiety at the root of her violence. She hasn’t had an episode in over a year. 

Jane Griffiths, CEO and founder of CAPA First Response, which helps families facing child-against-parent aggression, believes earlier intervention and better training for teachers and social workers could make a significant difference for families.

“We need to take away parental blame and look at it more systematically,” she said.

For Leslie, the road has been long and the grief ongoing. Hunter is starting college this fall and plans to study engineering, a bright spot in a challenging journey. Leslie hopes for the best, but still carries guilt, anger and shame.

“No one prepares you for a kid you can’t deal with,” she said, voicing a difficult reality that many parents contend with behind closed doors.

As ICE enforcement and detentions continue to surge, immigrant communities are in anguish 

As the Trump administration presses forward with its campaign of detention, family separation and deportation, the mental health of immigrant communities continues to decline. 

The push has intensified the deep anguish of many who escaped unbearable trauma in their home countries only to be dogged by inescapable anxiety in the place where they sought refuge. 

“What seemed to sit underneath it for many patients was this profound sense of helplessness,” said Sophia Pages, a licensed marriage and family therapist and executive director of behavioral health at Zocalo Health, a network of primary care clinics that largely serve Latino families on Medicaid.

No matter their course of action — being extra-careful, changing routines or even staying home more — nothing protects against ICE, patients said.

“And that loss of control was deeply destabilizing and can intensify depression, trauma-related distress and suicidal thinking,” Pages told NPR. 

More than half of the patients Zocalo screened dealt with anxiety so great it affected their daily lives. Almost 75% had depression and nearly 1 in 8 contemplated suicide — a rate of suicidal ideation more than twice that of the general population. 

Esperanza, a 29-year-old mother of two from Oaxaca, Mexico, came to the United States in 2023 after a local cartel began extorting her family — demanding fees to farm their own land and pressuring her husband into drug runs.

“When things started getting really bad, we grabbed our stuff and came to the border,” she said, asking that only her first name be used to protect her asylum case. 

The journey was traumatic in itself: Cartel members followed them until they crossed into the U.S. By the time they began building a life in California, Esperanza was already struggling. “I wasn’t sleeping. I was having heart palpitations. I was just getting clammy all the time. And that was really affecting me as a woman, as a wife and as a mother.”

When ICE raids began sweeping through the Los Angeles area, her symptoms worsened. Facing immigration court, she was consumed by a single fear: “What if they send me back? What if my kids stay and they just send me? What’s going to happen to them?”

Her 11-year-old son carries the same dread. He is terrified to let her leave the house alone, afraid she’ll be taken while he’s not there. “If they get both of us, then at least we’ll be together,” he said.

Their experience is not an outlier. Children in immigrant communities were already carrying a heavier mental health burden before enforcement expanded — navigating new cultures, languages and environments while managing past trauma and discrimination.

“All those things existed already, putting these communities at risk,” said Ariana Hoet, a pediatric psychologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “Now we add a chronic stressor — this is what’s happening with immigration.”

In mixed-status families, most children are acutely aware of their parents’ vulnerability and live in fear of separation. 

A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that those who experience a parent’s deportation face more than double the odds of developing PTSD.

The effects ripple outward, with children in surrounding communities reporting higher levels of depression, anxiety and trauma. It even shows up in their bodies and behavior.

“You see kids become more clingy, very anxious and worried,” Hoet said. “They can become quieter, withdrawn socially. They don’t want to do things that they typically do.”

For Esperanza, therapy has helped a little. She has learned breathing exercises, found community through her local church, and is sharing the coping skills she’s learned with her husband and son. It is the best she can do, faced with the specter of an ICE regime that does not care about her or her family’s wellbeing.

In other news…

The gendered history of mental illness: America has long applied a gendered double standard to mental illness. In this TIME column promoting her new book, An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln, author Lois Romano offers a stark historical example through our 16th president and his wife. Though both grappled with deep depression, they faced vastly different levels of consequence and support. 

President Lincoln’s melancholy, for instance, was framed as moral depth and contemplative leadership. Mary’s grief, on the other hand — despite losing three children and watching her husband be assassinated in front of her — was labeled hysteria and used as evidence of an irredeemable character flaw.

She was never afforded the grace extended to him — not even from her own son. In 1875, Robert Lincoln ambushed her with an incompetency trial featuring seven physicians who declared her insane, though only one had actually ever treated her. Robert later suffered his own nervous breakdown; institutionalization was never a concern.

But the Lincolns are far from an isolated case. Extending empathy to men struggling with mental health while branding women as unstable has gone on for centuries. “Hysteria,” a general term historically used to dismiss women displaying great emotion, was a medically-recognized diagnosis until 1980. 

Though postpartum depression is now becoming better-understood, it’s a relatively new diagnosis and was only added to the DSM in 1994. The stigma has softened, but the pattern hasn’t disappeared — women’s symptoms are still more likely to be dismissed while men sidestep diagnosis and rarely face discrimination. A shift from judgment to diagnosis and from stigma to treatment, Romano argues, would change not only how we remember women like Mary Todd Lincoln, but how we treat women living with mental illness today.