“It’s like living in a house with constant tremors, and every so
often, there’s an earthquake”
A Glaserian Grounded Theory study into harm to parents, caused by the
explosive and controlling impulses of their pre-adolescent children

Abstract

Children instigating harms, particularly in pre-adolescence, contradict our conceptualisations of what children ‘should’ be and how they ‘should’ behave. This creates further dissonance when the harm is inflicted upon parents and is often shrouded in silence and shame. As such, there is little known about the earliest indicators of child-to-parent violence, and this research was an attempt to improve this knowledge. Using a Glaserian Grounded Theory approach,
underpinned by participatory principles, I worked alongside individuals from families who were living with child-to-parent violence. Through exploring their everyday experiences, I sought to identify the main concern of the substantive population (families living with childto-parent violence) and identify how they attempted to resolve this main concern.

34 parents living with child-to-parent violence engaged in diary-based methods and interactive interviews; whilst 21 pre-adolescent children instigating these harms were
involved in weekly arts-based workshops. These two methods assisted in the generation of the ‘rescaling Grounded Theory’. A Delphi method with experts-by-experience and expert practitioners, alongside extant literature, was used to test the boundaries of the theory and its respective framework. This thesis presents rescaling in a ‘nested’ way with all chapters revolving around the respective chapter, rather than as a ‘big book’.

The rescaling process involves the social space in which each family member takes up, and how they adapt to one another whilst attempting to achieve the idealised ‘good parent’ or ‘good child’ identity. Furthermore, ‘child-to-parent violence and abuse’ was identified as an umbrella term which captures all forms of harm to a parent caused by their child; whereas ‘explosive and controlling impulses’ is introduced as a new term for harms instigated by children which does not involve an effort to control a parent but are an attempt to meet a specific need in the child but result in harm to others.