What Shapes a Child’s Future? Naming the Perpetrator’s Impact on Child Development
By Ruth Reymundo Mandel, Chief Business Development Officer and Credible Expert, Safe & Together Institute
When we talk about child development, we often focus on the benefits of nurturing environments. But we must also name how harmful environments are created—by the behaviors of a perpetrating parent who uses violence and control. According to the science of child development, what surrounds a child shapes them, and perpetrating parents shape environments that actively undermine children’s well-being.
The Environment Created by a Violent Parent
The Harvard Center on the Developing Child reminds us that children’s environments build their brain architecture. When a parent chooses coercion, violence, and control, they create a climate of fear, chaos, and deprivation—robbing the child of the stable foundation they need to thrive.
Children’s struggles are not personal failings—they are the direct result of the perpetrator’s actions, which:
Saturate the home with toxic stress.
Disrupt the protective parent-child bond, severing the child’s most crucial support system.
Destabilize key aspects of a child’s life, from home and schooling to access to safety and resources.
Multiple Pathways to Harm: The Reach of the Perpetrating Parent
Perpetrators of domestic violence don’t just harm their partners—they systematically disrupt multiple domains of their children’s lives, creating multiple pathways to harm that affect every layer of a child’s development, from basic needs to brain architecture.
Housing Instability: Perpetrating parents frequently cause families to lose housing through violence, financial control, or legal abuse. Forced moves, periods of homelessness, or unstable living conditions deeply harm children’s sense of safety, increase exposure to stressful transitions, and undermine their ability to develop secure attachment to place and community.
Educational Disruption: Exposure to a violent parent often results in difficulty concentrating, behavioral challenges, and frequent absences from school. Many children experience disrupted schooling due to fleeing violence, which undermines educational achievement, peer relationships, and long-term academic success.
Disrupted Nurturing Relationships: Perpetrating parents use tactics of isolation and undermining the protective parent, severing or weakening the child’s critical connections with nurturing caregivers. They may also restrict access to extended family and supportive adults, leaving the child more emotionally isolated, without the relational buffers that protect against trauma.
Reduced Access to Resources: Coercive control commonly involves financial abuse, leaving children and protective parents with limited access to food, healthcare, safe neighborhoods, recreational activities, and enrichment opportunities. This material deprivation compounds stress and limits opportunities for healthy growth and social development.
In addition to environmental harms, perpetrating parents cause direct neurobiological harm to their children through chronic exposure to toxic stress.
According to the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, persistent exposure to fear and trauma disrupts the child’s developing brain, over-activating the stress response system (especially the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex).
This toxic stress response leads to measurable changes in:
Brain architecture, which impairs learning, memory, and decision-making.
Hormonal systems, which damages immunity and short- and long-term physical health.
Emotional regulation, which increases the risk of anxiety, depression, and behavioral dysregulation.
The long-term impacts of this neurobiological disruption include increased risks of:
Mental health disorders (PTSD, depression, anxiety).
Substance misuse.
Chronic illnesses (diabetes, heart disease).
Educational underachievement.
Behavioral conditioning leading to increased Involvement in future unsafe or harmful relationships.
These multiple pathways to harm—including environmental instability and biological disruption of healthy development—are the intentional or inevitable outcomes of the perpetrating parent’s behavior and the environment created around the child. They must be seen as parenting choices.
Naming these impacts is essential to holding perpetrators accountable and guiding child welfare, healthcare, and legal systems toward effective, child-centered interventions.
A Developmentally Protective Approach: What Professionals Can Do
Despite the damage caused by the perpetrating parent, children can heal when professionals and systems focus on what works:
Strengthen the Protective Parent
Partner with protective parents to stabilize and strengthen the child’s most important healthy relationship.
Recognize that children’s connection to the protective adult survivor is a critical buffer against adversity, essential for healing and resilience.
Avoid practices that blame or burden protective parents, and instead, support their safety, capacity, and caregiving role.
Restore Developmental Stability
Protect and rebuild access to safe housing, consistent schooling, nurturing adults, and key community resources.
Treat interventions not just as crisis responses but as developmental opportunities to support the child’s long-term well-being.
Engage the Perpetrating Parent
Professionals must engage perpetrating parents directly about their patterns of coercive control, violence, and impact on the family.
This engagement 1) names the harm and its developmental consequences; 2) interrupts minimization and denial, shifting focus to the perpetrator’s responsibility; and 3) creates opportunities for change, giving perpetrating parents the chance to take accountability and begin making safer, healthier choices for their children.
When systems hold perpetrators accountable and engage them with an expectation for behavior change, it becomes a developmentally protective intervention. It moves the burden off the child and protective parent—and rightly places the focus on the one causing the harm.
Reframing the Narrative: It’s About the Perpetrator’s Choices
Children exposed to domestic violence are not broken. They are navigating environments shaped by a parent’s choice to harm. By naming the perpetrator’s role and addressing the multiple pathways to harm they create, we shift:
From blaming protective parents to partnering with them.
From labeling children as “at-risk” to removing the risks imposed by the perpetrator.
From treating domestic violence as a private conflict to recognizing its public health and developmental impact.
We protect children not just by responding to incidents—but by changing the conditions around them, and that starts with naming the source: the perpetrating parent’s behavior.
Additional Resources
Blog: When Play Disappears: How Domestic Abuse Perpetrators Violate a Child’s Right to Joy
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence
