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 violent rage. 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 hurting me instead,” 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 Dungeons & Dragons, 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 Lilly Shanahan, 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, How can I love this person? Then, 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 me.”

After 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........

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