When Your Teenager Hits You

This is the page most parents read with the door shut. It will be plain and it will be short, because that is what is useful tonight.

What do I do in the first few minutes?

Get distance. A door, a stairwell, the car, the garden. Distance is not defeat and it is not rewarding anything. It ends the incident, which is the only goal available right now.

Do not restrain. Holding a teenager who is bigger or heavier than you turns one moment into a grappling match, and injuries in both directions come from that far more often than from the first shove. Do not hit back, for the same reason and for others.

Move any other children out of the room, and do not ask one of them to step in.

Then two practical things, tonight, before you sleep. Look at whatever got hurt, and get it seen if it needs seeing. And write down what happened while you can still remember the order: time, what was said, what was done, what you did. You may never use that note. If you do end up talking to a doctor, a school or a lawyer, it will be the most useful piece of paper you own.

How common is this, really?

We do not have a trustworthy figure, and this site will not print one it cannot stand behind. There is no count in our sources of how many teenagers hit a parent.

What is countable is the courts. In 2023, courts with juvenile jurisdiction handled 653,800 delinquency cases, and simple assault, at 158,000 cases, was the single largest person offence category. That is the road between an ordinary household and a courthouse, and it is well travelled. It is not a rate, a risk or a prediction for your child, and it should not be read as one.

What that number does tell you is that you are not the only household. The silence around this is not evidence of rarity. It is evidence of shame.

Does this mean I have failed?

No, and the question deserves a better answer than reassurance.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry publishes a set of risk factors linked to violent behaviour in young people. Most of them are things no parent chooses: family heredity, what a child has been exposed to elsewhere, what has been done to them by other people. Its threshold for acting is deliberately conjunctive, meaning several of those risk factors together with the behaviours it lists, not one incident and not one behaviour.

So the honest position is that being hit tells you something happened in your house. It does not tell you why, it does not grade you, and it does not name a condition. Anyone offering you a diagnosis from a description is guessing, including your relatives.

What does calling the police actually involve?

This site does not recommend calling and does not recommend against it. It is not reversible, the consequences land on people this page cannot see, and the rules differ by state and by county. What follows is a description, not a nudge.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention publishes the shape of the system, and its own caveat has to come first: “Even within States, case processing often varies from community to community depending on local practice and tradition.”

With that said, here is the funnel, using the agency’s figures for 2019. Twenty five percent of all arrests involving youth were handled inside the police department and then released. Of the cases that reached juvenile court intake, less than half, 46 percent, were handled informally. About one in four delinquency cases referred to juvenile court involved detention. Of the cases that were formally petitioned, 53 percent resulted in an adjudication of delinquency. Of adjudicated cases, 65 percent had formal probation as the most severe outcome and 27 percent resulted in a placement in a residential facility.

Read as a whole: most contacts do not become court cases, most court cases do not become adjudications, and most adjudications do not become placements. At nearly every step the default is to step down rather than up.

Read the other way: each of those steps is a decision made by somebody who is not you, and once the first call is made you do not control the rest. Both readings are true. Which matters more in your house is not something a website can weigh.

What happens if I do not call?

Nothing automatic. There is no clock running and no obligation created by a single incident.

The risk of the quiet route is not legal, it is domestic. An incident nobody names tends to become an incident nobody can mention, and the next one starts from there. So if you do not involve anyone official, involve someone unofficial. One adult outside the house who knows what happened changes the situation more than any script does.

Who can actually advise me?

Four kinds of people, and none of them is a search engine.

A lawyer in your state. Parental liability, juvenile law and what a police contact means all differ by state, and a half hour of real advice is worth more than a week of reading.

Your child’s doctor. This is the ordinary, unglamorous route into a proper assessment, and it starts with an appointment you can already get. If it goes further, a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation is a described process rather than a mystery: a description of the present problems, health and treatment history, family history, developmental information, school and friends, family relationships, an interview with your child, an interview with you, and laboratory tests only if they are needed. What happens at a first appointment sets out the rest.

The advocates at the services listed at the top of this page, including the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Ask them what they can and cannot do before you tell them anything, which is the question printed in that block.

Your child’s school, within real limits. What a school counsellor can and cannot do is honest about where those limits are, including on confidentiality.

What actually helps

Distance, agreed in advance. Decide now, while nothing is happening, which room you leave to and which door you use. A plan made at eight in the evening is worth ten plans made at midnight.

Not being in the doorway. Most parents who get hit were blocking an exit, usually without meaning to.

Lowering arousal rather than discharging it. In the largest review of anger management activities to date, covering 154 studies and 10,189 people of all ages, activities that lowered physical arousal, including slow breathing, muscle relaxation and taking a timeout, reduced anger and aggression at a moderate size. Activities that raised arousal did nothing on average. That applies to you as much as to your teenager, and in the moment your arousal is the one you can actually control. There is more on this at what to do while it is happening.

What this looks like in an ordinary house

Neve is a parent, not a case study, and this is an illustration rather than a real family.

Her seventeen year old shoves her hard into the door frame during an argument about coming home. She does not grab him and she does not shout back. She goes out of the front door and sits in the car for ten minutes with the window down.

When she comes back in, he is in his room. She does not open that conversation. She checks her elbow, which is scraped, and she writes four lines on the back of an envelope: what time, what was said, what he did, what she did.

The next morning she rings her sister and tells her, which is the first time anyone outside the house has known. Then she books an appointment with the family doctor for the following week, and she looks up what a legal advice line in her state costs, without ringing it yet. She has not decided anything about the police. She does not have to decide tonight, and she knows that deciding at midnight would be deciding by accident.