Reports of children abusing their parents are becoming more frequent every day. And the age at which they start to abuse, first verbally and then physically, is decreasing. What is happening is often described in great detail, but there is a lack of explanation as to why it is happening and how to prevent it.

I will not refer here to the maltreatment attributable to a pathology of the children, but to subject of Education that they received at home. The comment of many parents is well known: "this son is the black sheep of the family, because having given him the same Education as his siblings, he is the only one who has turned out badly". I respond by referring to Aristotle: it is as unjust to treat the equal as it is to treat the unequal as unequal.

 The ugly duckling in the story was not ugly; he was just different, so different that he was not a duck. Prior to educate is to know. Some children must be spoken to the heart and others to the head. Some respond better to stimuli than to demands and vice versa. This issue used to be called "Education tailored" and now "Education personalized". It is much talked about, but very little applied in the family. A serial Education creates distances between parents and children, which can lead to mutual misunderstanding and possible prejudice.

Today, families are much smaller at issue of children. This causes them to receive an excess of care. Some parents adopt roles as diverse as being their chauffeur, their cook, their butler... with the goal of favoring the success and happiness of the child. Children get used to their parents being their servants, so they often scold them if the service is sometimes not to their liking.

  Many parents today are not concerned with educating freedom manager and willpower, but rather with obsessively fostering their children's self-esteem. They are not aware that they may be nurturing a cult of the "I" that can later respond in the form of a boomerang.

Authority is not fashionable, especially because it is confused with authoritarianism. Following the law of the pendulum, there has been a shift from authority to permissiveness educational, closely related to moral permissiveness. Apparently, guilt no longer exists; there is only weakness and immaturity. Perhaps this is why many people have exchanged their confessor for a psychologist.

At the moment, spontaneous behavior is valued and encouraged to the detriment of reflective behavior and manager. But will children become what they are called to be if we educators do not intervene in their lives?

From weak parents usually grow tyrannical children. A very anguished mother told me that her nine-year-old son had pulled her hair for (unintentionally) covering the TV set while a goal was being scored, when she brought him the dinner tray. The lady also confessed that her son had not been allowed to eat anything but fried eggs and ham since he was a child.

We have gone from children's fear of their parents to parents' fear of their children. It is a "new" fear, which goes against the nature of the family and the cultural and social traditions.

 Physical aggressions against parents do not arise suddenly, but are preceded by consensual disrespect and conflicts that were not resolved at the time. If we allow violence to escalate, it will be more difficult to banish it.

The cases of children who physically abuse their parents are usually hidden, because the parents do not report them in order not to cause pain to their children and not to feel publicly humiliated. I think it is a mistake in cases of severe abuse to never report it.

The profile of the abusive child is the following: intolerant to frustration; insecure, with a weak self that he tries to disguise with violence; without feelings of guilt. Permissivism induces him to this, because he does not financial aid him to internalize the evil committed and to refer it to morality.

In the prevention of violence in children, it is essential to set rules and limits on their behavior, so that they learn from an early age that they cannot have everything they want. It is also convenient to give them responsibilities according to their age. Finally, it is good to allow them to feel sometimes small frustrations, without waiting for the parents to take the chestnuts out of the fire, since this way they will learn to tolerate and to confront the many that exist throughout the life.