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Intentionally Disturbing
DV Relationship - Staying for the kids? It's harming them more than you know.
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Welcome back to Intentionally disturbing. And yes, this will be a more disturbing topic, but not true crimey. More in the we want to prevent harm to children and understand what happens to a child when they are in a home filled with domestic v. Domestic violence. I'm Dr. Leslie, forensic psychologist and unfortunately I know too much about this topic because of cases I've been on. I want to start with something that people say with the best intentions and that I need you to hear differently. I'm staying for the kids. I know why women say it. I know it comes from love. I know it comes from fear of blowing up the children's world. I know it comes from desperate belief that two parents in the home, even an imperfect one, is better than one. And I need to tell you, with 20 years of experience in psychology, forensic psychology research, courtroom experience behind me, the science does not not support that staying home is where abuse, coercive control or dangerous behavior is. That does not protect your children. It exposes them to something that will rewire their brain, alter their development, shape their relationships for decades and in the worst cases end their lives. Today we are talking about what actually happens to children who grow up in these homes. Not in vague abstract terms, in specific research backed forensic detail with the cases and the science that back it up because you deserve to understand what is at stake and so do your kids. So again, I'm Dr. Leslie and let's go. Let's address the staying for the kids argument directly because it is deeply entrenched and it deserves a real answer, not a bumper sticker. The assumption underneath it is that children need their father in the home more than they need safety. That the visible trauma of a family breaking apart is worth breaking apart is worse than the visible trauma of living inside a controlled, fearful and violent environment. That children aren't being harmed if they're not directly being hid. All three of those assumptions are wrong. And here's what research actually shows us. Children do not need to be the direct victims of violence to be harmed by it. Witnessing intimate partner violence, hearing it through a wall, finding their mother crying, watching their father's face change, learning to read the tension in the room produces measurable, documented psychological and neurological harm. A 2023 systematic review published in the Egyptian Journal of Forensic Sciences yes, that exists, guys. Analyzing 18 peer reviewed studies confirmed that children exposed to domestic violence suffer a wide range of psychological, mental and behavioral consequences, both short and long lasting, mild and severe. Witnessing it, not just experiencing it directly. And in 2025 there was another review published by Trauma Violence and abuse. It analyzed 25 quantitative studies, so it has tons of numbers here. Lots of experience, some with sample sizes exceeding 5,000 children, found that younger children exposed to intimate partner violence face immediate behavioral disruptions and cognitive impairment, while older children are more likely to develop depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder. Ptsd. Different ages, different symptoms, the same root cause. The house isn't protecting them. The house is the problem. Let's talk about what is actually happening inside your child's body and brain when they live in a home with abuse or chronic fear. Because that is what staying for the kids actually costs. In the 90s, the CDC partnered with Kaiser Permanente to conduct one of the largest investigations of childhood trauma ever completed. They surveyed over 17,000 adults about their childhood experiences and mapped those experiences to health and behavioral outcomes in adulthood. This became known as the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. The ACE Study if you've been to family court, you're probably familiar with this. One of the 10 categories of adverse childhood experiences they identified witnessing domestic violence in the household. Here's what the ACE study found. The more adverse childhood experiences a child accumulates, the worse their outcome across every dimension. Mental health physical health Substance use relationships Life expectancy people without ACEs have a 12% chance of develop. People without ACEs have a 12 percent chance of developing depression. With a high ACE score at risk climbs to 35% in men and 66% in women. The research of a suicide attempt increases by 5000% with an ACE score of 6.5000%. Witnessing domestic violence counts every single time. Still don't believe me? Here's some neuroscience in plain English for you guys and women, whomever, whoever this helps. When a child lives in a home where they feel unsafe, where there's constantly. Where they're constantly scanning for danger, managing a parent's mood, breaking for explosion, their brain is operating under chronic toxic stress. This is not the healthy adaptive stress of a difficult test or a sports competition. This is the kind of prolonged, unpredictable stress that floods the brain with cortisol, that's the stress hormone on a near constant basis. Research published in 2024 in the world Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews found that prolonged exposure to this kind of toxic stress causes measurable disruption to the brain architecture, specifically in the three areas most critical to a child's development. I'm sure you've heard this before, but I'm going to go through the three brain structures. First we have the amygdala. This is your threat detection center. It becomes hyperactive. The child is always on alert, always scanning this is why children from those homes are often described as anxious or oversensitive. They are not being dramatic. Their threat detector is stuck on. Second, the hippocampus responsible for memory and learning is comprised by sustained cortisol exposure. This is why these children often struggle academically. Not because they're smart, because their brain is allocating resources to survival, not learning. Third, the prefrontal cortex responsible for emotional regulation, decision making and impulse control. Control develops more slowly under chronic stress. This is why children from these homes have difficulty managing their emotions and behavior. The part of the brain that does that job was never given a chance to develop normally. Now, this is not dramatic language. This is documented, peer reviewed neuroscience and it happens whether or not your child is ever directly touched. I also just want to put a note in here. Don't over diagnose your child and think that they're around violence when they're not. This is in a very clear domestic violence household. We want to look at signs and symptoms and that is what a neuropsychologist would do if you took your kid in and had them checked out, which I highly recommend. It's always good to have a baseline on anyone in case anything happens anyways. The effects of living in a home with DV are not uniform, though. They show up differently depending on a child's developmental stage. And that's pretty obvious, right? I want to walk you through each one a little bit because it matters for your recognition depending on your child's age. So let's talk about infants and toddlers age 0 to 3. About. Research shows that more than 50% of infants in homes with partner abuse cry excessively and have disrupted eating and sleeping patterns. This age, children cannot understand what is happening, but their nervous system registers it completely. The caregiver is supposed to be the source of safety when the caregiver is also the source of fear. Directly or indirectly, it disrupts the most fundamental attachment bond a human being ever forms. Disrupted attachment at this stage doesn't just mean a difficult baby. It predicts difficulty with trust, emotional regulation and close relationships for the rest of the person's life. It can. It can also be fixed and made better through a lot of work. But don't think that just because the baby's around that they're not being internalized. Like I just think about that poor kid with that Utah reality star and the parents fighting and the chair being thrown. I think her name was Taylor. That kid, that kid was watching. That kid will never forget that. Okay, preschool, let's think age 3 to 5 somatic symptoms start to appear. So that's when the kids are saying they have stomach aches, headaches, sleep problems. They might regress into bedwetting, thumb sucking, clinging. They may have intense anxiety around strangers. Children this age are highly egocentric, as we know. They believe that they cause things. They really, it's like the grown up narcissist. They often believe the violence is their fault though. And that's the problem. That belief is never corrected. It becomes a template for their life. So let's talk about School 6 to 12. This is where the split starts. It becomes more visible. Some children internalize, so they get anxiety, depression, withdrawal, declining grades. And some will externalize aggression, bullying, lying. There's a 2025 science study where they noted that children at this stage frequently withdraw from peers out of shame and guilt, believing they are responsible for the chaos at home. So they start to isolate. They stop bringing friends over. They become expert secret keepers. We don't want that. From ages 6 to 12, also at this stage, children begin to form their understanding of what relationships should look like. What they see modeled at home becomes their baseline for normal. And then we'll go through adolescence, ages 13 to 18. And again, these aren't all precise, but they're chunks of ages where these things apply. We see depression, PTSD become more complex and way more entrenched. Risk behaviors increase significantly, like substance use, early sexual activity, self harm. Relationships often begin to mirror the patterns that they witness at home. And there's more research on this too that says older children are significantly more likely to experience complex emotional challenges, including full clinical PTSD from chronic ipv, interpersonal, intimate partner violence, exposure, whatever you want to call it, it's turning into something bad in the brain. And here is the one that I really want you to hear. I thought this was a really good article. The 2025 theoretical analysis published in Trauma, Violence and Abuse. So it reviewed decades of research and it found that children who witness bi directional parental violence, both parents going at it, are significantly more likely to perpetrate intimate partner violence themselves in adulthood. The cycle doesn't break in itself. It requires an interruption. This is a wakeup call for all of us parents. The interruption has to be deliberate, conscious. We have to interrupt the cycle early on. Our kids can't watch this. I want to spend a few minutes on what researchers call intergenerational transmission. Big words. But the cycle of violence, because this is the piece that reframes, staying for the kids permanently. The research is consistent across multiple decades and multiple countries. Children who grow up witnessing intimate partner violence are statistically more likely to either experience or perpetrate IPV in their own adult relationships. The pathway is not inevitable. Resistance is real and protective factors like strong relationships with non abusive parents or other people. And maybe we're talking about violence that isn't back and forth. Maybe predominantly it's from one parent and not the other. So they have the ability to model the safer parent. And we want community around them. We want support, therapeutic intervention. We want anything to stop and interrupt the cycle. But either way the baseline risk is going to be significantly elevated. So here's how it works. According to current research, social learning theory, Psychology 101, it says that children learn what relationships look like by watching the adults in their lives. If conflict means getting hit, someone gets controlled, someone apologizes and it happens again. That becomes the template for what love and intimacy are supposed to feel like. Not because the child wants violence, because the nervous system learned to read that as attachment disruption. This means that insecure attachment formed in childhood, the kind that happens when caregivers are simultaneously the source source of safety and fear, predicts difficulty forming secure bonds in adult relationships. Insecure attachment is one of the mechanisms researchers have identified as a driver of intergenerational IPV transmission. And then the threat rewards nervous system. The one I described in the last video gets calibrated. In childhood, if intensity felt like home, intensity will feel like love. As an adult. If walking on eggshells was normal, calm will feel unsettling. The nervous system seeks what it knows. Let's use some celebrity case examples that have been very public. I want to talk about Halle Berry. Halle Berry has been public about growing up watching her father beat her mother, sometimes with wine bottles. She has described watching her mother's abuse as a defining experience of her childhood, one that left her with profound low self esteem and what she described as a pattern of ch using the wrong men throughout her adult life. In a 2021 interview on FRESH AIR. You should look it up. It's good, she said. I grew up with an alcoholic father that was very abusive, both verbally, emotionally and physically. She also said that the experience drove her into relationships where abuse was repeated because she learned that love was supposed to look like that in her house. Halle Berry is one of the most successful, gorgeous and celebrated actresses was alive. She had access to resources, therapy, support, and the pattern still followed her into adulthood because she was able to do the work, because she wasn't able to do the work to interrupt it. And that is by no means a Character flaw. That's simply what childhood exposure to DV does. It writes a really strong fucking script internal. And the internal work is rewriting that script. And it's incredibly difficult. Another celebrity example is Christina Aguilera. She has openly spoken about witnessing her father physically and emotionally abuse her mother, including describing nights when she and her mother had to flee the house in the middle of the night to escape her escape to her grandmother's house. She. She has said the violence and fear she grew up, up in is the direct origin of her music. That fighter, beautiful, the voice that made her famous came from pain, just like the video I did on Paris Hilton. How she turned trauma into her legacy and changed made legislation. Christina said the pain at home is where my love for music came from. She turned it into something she had to find an outlet for trauma that she had been carrying since she was a small child. The trauma was already there. The house was already doing its work. And we can definitely reference true crime cases on this, too, like the case of Susan Powell. She disappeared from her West Valley City, Utah home in 2009. Her husband, Josh, was always the primary suspect. He was never charged. And in the meantime, their two boys, Charlie and Brayden. They were seven and five at the time. Were caught in the middle of a custody battle between Josh and Susan's parents. Charlie and Braden had been with their father on the night their mother vanished. Whatever those children experienced or witnessed that night, we will never fully know. I mean, we have assumptions. What we know is that they were then placed back with their father on supervised visits, despite all the red flags that the experts later testified to. Close to 50 red flags, I'd say, including the fact that Josh Powell was the sole suspect in their mother's presumed murder. So by 2012, during a supervised visit at Josh's home, he locked the caseworker outside, attacked both boys with a hatchet, poured gasoline throughout the house, and set it on fire. Charlie was 7. Braden was 5. Washington state was later found liable in a wrongful death brought by Susan's parents. And the jury awarded more than $98 million. I bring this case up not for shock value, although there is some shock there. I bring it up because those boys are the most extreme example of what happens when red flags are seen by everyone and not acted on. The children were living with a dangerous man. The system knew. The red flags were documented. The intervention came too late. Charlie and Braden Powell are the reason the answer stay for the kids has to be examined truly and honestly. Their mother was gone, and the father the system allowed those boys to be placed back with killed them. I know that's hard. It's supposed to be. I want to be clear about something because I said this isn't about shame and I mean it. Not every child who grows up in a home with DV develops lasting trauma. Resilience is real. Research consistently identifies protective factors that can buffer children from the worst outcomes. A strong consistent relationship with the non abusive parent. Access to at least one safe, stable adult outside the home, like a teacher, grandparent, coach. Community support and connection. Therapeutic intervention, early and ongoing. The child's own temperament and cognitive resources. The research from the 2024 World Journal Paper is explicit. While risks are substantial, not all exposed children demonstrate impairment. POS positive chi, positive parent child relationships act as genuine buffers. Community support can compensate for functional dysfunction. What this means practically, your relationship with your children is a protective factor. You being present, stable and emotionally available to them, even inside a difficult situation matters. And it matters a lot. It doesn't eliminate the harm, but it reduces it. And this is exactly why getting safe is not just for you. Because when you are traumatized, depleted, hypervigilant, managing an abusive partner, your capacity to be that buffer for your children is compromised. Protecting yourself is protecting them. That is not a metaphor. That is what research has shown us. If you're watching this and recognizing your home or recognizing your childhood, here is what I want you to take with you. For mothers still in this situation, your children need you to be their safe parent. That job gets harder every day you stay. The protection you think you're providing by keeping the family together is competing with the harm the environment is producing. And the research is clear on which one wins over time. Talk to your kids. Talk about the details. Not to make them your confidant, your confidant, but enough to say this is not normal, this is not your fault, and I love you. Silence teaches children that what's happening is too shameful to name. So I want you to name it at an age appropriate level, of course. That is the intervention. Get them into therapy. Children's DV advocacy programs. There's DV shelters with specialized children's services, kids clubs, child advocates, play therapy. Domesticshelters.org I listed a lot in my other video, but they can really help you find programs that serve you and your children.