An understanding of escalation processes is crucial to any confrontation with violence. Escalation processes, as we saw, are of two kinds: reciprocal and complementary (Orford 1986). In parent-child relations, these two types of escalation intensify each other, and an ongoing swing between giving in and hitting out has been shown to be a common characteristic of families with violent and self-destructive children (Bugental et al. 1989; Patterson et al. 1984). In this chapter, we attempt to trace the processes that fuel these two types of escalation and suggest possible ways of averting them.

SUBMISSION

Parents submit in order to buy quiet. This hope, however, is bound to prove illusory for, with the parents' growing submission, the child raises the price of quiet by new demands and more extreme acts (Patterson et al. 1984; Patterson, Reid, & Dishion 1992). Gradually, the parents develop a pervasive submissive attitude and come to believe that they have no way of resisting, but must adapt the life of the family – including the behavior of their other children – to the aggressive child's demands. The parents thus become the executors of the aggressive child's will, thereby harming not only themselves, but also their children.

Emerging from submission is a gradual process and it is not at all the same as “going on the war path.”