Let’s talk about coercive control

By Lee Tempest, January 2026.

This is written by a parent who has lived with child‑to‑parent violence and abuse.  It speaks about different forms of violence, including coercive control.  It speaks to endurance, to doing your best in an impossible situation, and to surviving sustained coercive control and violence that is rarely understood or believed when it is inflicted by a child. 

Helenas story 

Raising my daughter was not a joy.  I grieve that deeply. 
Now that she is an adult, I still cry every day over the what ifs over how life should have been but is not.  A close, loving relationship is not mine to treasure.  Instead, I am left trying to rebuild myself and find an identity that was stripped away over years of control and fear. 

My identity as a mother was taken from me. 

For many years I lived with all forms of violence apart from sexual abuse, inflicted by my child.  I would likely still be living with it now, but to some degree I can protect myself because she is an adult and no longer lives with me.  I no longer allow her into my home.  My home needs to be a safe place. 

Even so, I still live in fear as she can still be violent to me. 
I feel like a failure not only as a mother, but as a human being. 

But I did my best. 
And it was not enough. 

Physical assaults did occur, though not as often as people might expect. What dominated my life was the constant threat of being harmed.  My daughter chose knives as her primary tool of control.  If I did not do what I was instructed to do, if I did not take her where she wanted to go, or buy her what she demanded each day there was a knife used to control me.  

If I was away from the home I was bombarded with phone calls and messages asking where I was and when I would return.  I was punished for time away.  Threatened with what was going to happen to me when I returned.   

For years she told me what a failure and terrible person I was.  Her narrative became my narrative.  

As I write this, I am rocking in a chair. Tears are streaming down my face.  My body remembers as if it is happening again.   

I stopped locking knives away.  If I did, other household objects were weaponised.  Glass was smashed. Stanley knives were taken from the garage.  When I managed to flee to my bedroom, the knives would then be used on herself.  She would cut herself and send me videos to hurt me, to punish me, telling me I had made her do this because I disobeyed her. 

Knives were not the only threat.  She would run at me with her fist raised, air‑punching just short of my face, telling me I was “going to get it” if I did not comply.   She would threaten to tip boiling water over me if I was cooking.  The pets would be hurt and lived in fear, the dog kicked, the cat strangled, the chicken killed. 

This violence happened every day. 
Multiple times a day. 
For years and years. 

She began using knives to control me at the age of six. 

Some people say children cannot have control over adults. That assumption is naïve, dangerous, and deeply damaging.  I was told that if I wanted to be believed, I needed evidence and that I had to call 111. 

When I did, the police were incredible. But after that we were passed back and forth between services like a ping pong ball.   No one truly supported us.   I was told to put boundaries in place, to impose consequences.  When I tried, the violence escalated.  Boundaries did not bring safety; they brought more harm. 

I eventually stopped asking for help as the help offered just fed my internal narrative that I was a failure. 

Sometimes children cannot live with their mum. 
Sometimes it is not safe. 

This is not about lack of love it is about a lack of safety.