Child to parent violence: contributions from quantitative and qualitative studies.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in children’s aggression towards their parents during adolescence. What is known as filio-parental violence involves repeated behaviors of physical and psychological violence towards parents or figures that occupy their role. This symposium presents recent findings on child to parent violence in adolescence in order to identify some psychological mechanisms involved in its perpetuation, its overlap with other forms of violence, new forms of child to parent violence and factors predicting desistance. The symposium gathers results obtained with both quantitative and qualitative methodology, with clinical and community samples. In the first paper, the overlap between child to parent violence and dating violence is examined, identifying cognitive schemas common to both problems. In the second paper, through the testimonies of adolescents who have experienced child to parent violence, we describe the processes of desistance after the end of the interventions. The third paper evaluates how adolescents’ internalizing symptoms act as antecedents to child to parent violence through dysfunctional coping mechanisms. Finally, the fourth paper presents a new modality of child to parent violence, Cyber child to parent violence, evaluated from focus groups with adolescents, parental figures and professional experts in the area.