Next up in our conference blogs is mine! It was an absolute privilege to be the first panel speaker of the Reframing Professional Practice conference, and Maria did a great job of creating a life course narrative thread through the planning of the day. My particular interests are the early indicators and how we can support families before harm escalates. Here’s a bit more about that:
When families experience Child-to-Parent Aggression (CPA), or child and adolescent-to-parent violence and abuse (CAPVA), the response often comes too late. Support frequently arrives when harm has escalated, relationships feel fractured, parents are exhausted, and children are already being viewed through a lens of risk. However, families do not suddenly arrive at crisis. There are usually moments, sometimes years earlier, where different questions could have been asked and different support could have been offered.
One of the challenges within this field is that we have often tried to understand children’s harmful behaviours using frameworks developed for adults. Yet children are not adults. Their behaviour exists within the context of development, relationships, unmet needs, emotional regulation, neurodivergence, trauma, family systems, and wider social pressures. This distinction matters.
When a child causes harm, we must hold two truths at the same time: parents can be experiencing very real fear, distress, and harm, and the child causing that harm may also be struggling. Recognising a child’s needs does not minimise a parent’s experience. Instead, it creates more accurate opportunities for support. Many younger children displaying aggressive or harmful behaviours are not necessarily acting from a place of deliberate intent, control, or a desire to cause fear. For some children, these behaviours may be better understood as explosive and harmful impulses; expressions of distress or maladaptive attempts to meet underlying needs.
This requires us to move beyond asking only: “How do we stop this behaviour?”
We also need to ask:
- “What need is this behaviour trying to meet?”
- “What is happening within this child, this relationship, this family, and this wider system?”
Children communicate through behaviour, particularly when they do not yet have the emotional, cognitive, or relational tools to communicate in other ways. Harmful behaviour may reflect reactive responses to overwhelm, affective needs linked to emotional or sensory regulation, relational needs around belonging and connection, or attempts to regain a sense of safety. If we only respond to the visible behaviour, we risk missing the distress underneath.
Too often, families seeking help describe feeling blamed. Parents may feel they are seen as failing to manage their child, while children may internalise messages that they are simply “bad” or “dangerous”. These narratives can increase shame and make families less likely to seek support until they reach breaking point. Earlier intervention means creating pathways where families can ask for help before they are in crisis. It means recognising that parents are often the most important people supporting their child — but they cannot do this without being supported themselves. Expecting families to absorb increasingly complex needs without appropriate help is not prevention.
A meaningful response to CPA must therefore be relational and systemic. It must consider the whole family: parents, siblings, children, schools, communities, and the services surrounding them. No single explanation or intervention will fit every family, because families’ experiences are not all the same. This is why public health approaches are so important. We need to build systems that notice early signs, reduce stigma, provide accessible support, and respond to need rather than waiting for harm to escalate.
Earlier intervention is not about excusing harmful behaviour. It is about understanding it well enough to change it. When we recognise children as children, listen to parents without blame, and respond to families with curiosity rather than judgement, we create opportunities for repair, connection, and safety.
The future of CPA support should not be built around asking families to prove they are struggling enough… It should be built around ensuring they never have to reach that point in the first place.
Whilst some of this may feel like ‘blue sky thinking’; will we ever have the resources and capacity to provide true early intervention again? I don’t know, but relational practice is at the heart of all of this, and with so many in the room with us at the conference who have the power to make change, I really believe it’s possible.
Nikki Rutter
HOLES IN THE WALL 