Who Hurts Children More: Fathers or Mothers?
When we talk about children being hit, one of the first questions people ask is whether fathers or mothers are more likely to be violent. Research from the UK, the US, and across Europe consistently shows that mothers are more often the perpetrators of physical punishment or abuse. This is largely because mothers are more likely to be the primary caregivers and therefore spend more time with their children. However, when fathers are violent, the impact tends to be different. A father’s violence is often more severe, more intimidating, and more damaging to a child’s sense of safety, largely because of physical size, strength, and the cultural weight of “dad’s authority.” For boys, especially, a violent father can leave a lasting psychological imprint because he is usually their first model of what it means to be a man.
What Does “Violent Father” Actually Mean?
The term “violent father” does not only mean a dad who physically beats his child. Violence can take many forms. It can be physical, such as hitting, punching, kicking, throwing objects, or using belts and cords. It can also be verbal, in the form of shouting, insults, or humiliating put-downs. Violence can include emotional intimidation, such as unpredictable rages, smashing things in the home, or constant threats that make children feel unsafe. Perhaps most devastating of all is when a boy grows up witnessing his father hit his mother or siblings. Even if he himself is not touched, the violence he sees and absorbs leaves just as deep a scar.
Do Boys See It as Violence?
What makes this even more complex is how boys themselves classify these experiences. Many do not call it “violence.” Instead, they may say, “That’s just how my dad was” or describe it as “discipline.” In some families and cultures, being hit is seen as a normal part of parenting, so boys may not realize that what they experienced was abuse. It is often only in adolescence, or later when comparing their experiences to their peers, that they begin to see the difference. Even then, many boys minimise the impact and carry a silent legacy of fear, shame, and confusion into adulthood.
What Does Growing Up With a Violent Father Do to Boys?
At an emotional level, boys who grow up with violent fathers often feel a mixture of fear, shame, anger, and confusion. They may live in constant hypervigilance, walking on eggshells to avoid triggering a father’s temper. They may carry shame, believing they deserved what happened to them. They may turn their anger inward, leading to depression and self-harm, or outward, repeating the patterns they grew up with. The deepest confusion often comes from the fact that they both love and fear the same person. A father is supposed to protect, but when he becomes the source of fear, it distorts a boy’s sense of safety, masculinity, and love.
Why Men Struggle to Name Maternal Violence
So in my therapy room when I work with girls and women they usually tell me about the violence and abuse they received from their mothers, but when I work with boys and men they usually don’t say a nothing about their mothers or they don’t see it as abuse but they do say about the abuse of their dads.
There are some deep psychological and cultural reasons why women are more likely to talk about their mothers’ violence, while men tend to minimise or overlook their mothers’ abuse but openly name their fathers’ violence. Here are some lenses to make sense of it:
The Cultural Story of Fathers vs Mothers
Society paints mothers as “nurturers” and fathers as “disciplinarians.” So when a mother is violent, it violates expectations — daughters often experience it as betrayal, and later talk about it because it feels so wrong. With fathers, boys are often raised to expect strictness, toughness, or even aggression. So when a dad is violent, it feels like an extension of what boys have been told “manhood” looks like — and they only begin to name it later when it feels unbearable or clearly crosses a line.
Gendered Socialisation in Naming Harm
Girls and women are generally given more permission to name their emotional pain. They grow up with language to describe how things “felt.” Boys and men, by contrast, are often socialised to downplay their own suffering and to see their experiences through the lens of toughness or survival. So when boys remember being hit or shouted at by their mothers, they may frame it as “discipline,” “nagging,” or “mum losing her temper,” rather than “abuse.” With fathers, though, they are more likely to talk about it because it fits a clearer cultural script: “dad was the violent one.”
The Mother as Sacred Figure
Psychodynamically, many boys idealise their mothers — sometimes well into adulthood. Even when their mother has been violent, they may unconsciously protect her image because she represents safety, care, and their earliest attachment. Admitting that “mum hurt me” can feel like a betrayal of the bond or even threaten their own sense of survival. Daughters, meanwhile, often experience mothers as competitors for identity and independence, which makes them more willing to confront their mothers’ harmful behaviour in therapy.
How Abuse Gets Framed in Families
In many households, a mother’s violence is framed as “losing control” or “discipline,” while a father’s violence is framed as “anger,” “abuse,” or even “terror.” This shapes memory. By the time men enter therapy, they may not even see their mother’s actions as “abuse.” They’ll remember their father’s anger more vividly because it carried greater fear and shame.
Therapeutic Safety and Transference
In the therapy room, men may find it “safer” to talk about their fathers. Criticising or exposing a mother can bring up guilt, shame, or even feelings of disloyalty. Women, on the other hand, often feel safer talking about their mothers because culturally and relationally, they’ve already navigated that mother-daughter tension.
Boys often protect their mother’s image while highlighting their father’s violence; girls often express the mother’s betrayal more readily. Both are telling the truth — but through the filters of culture, attachment, and identity.
From both clinical psychology and psychotherapy perspectives, having a violent father does several key things to a boy’s development, identity, and adult functioning. I’ll lay this out in layers:
Attachment and Safety
From a clinical psychology lens, a violent father disrupts the child’s attachment system. Fathers are supposed to provide safety, protection, and stability, but when a boy grows up fearing the very person who is meant to protect him, it creates disorganised attachment. This means the boy experiences both love and fear towards the same figure. Later in life, this shows up as deep mistrust of authority figures, difficulty relying on others, and a constant push–pull in intimate relationships.
Emotional Regulation and the Nervous System
Psychologically, repeated exposure to a father’s violence wires a boy’s nervous system for hypervigilance. He becomes highly sensitive to tone, expression, and changes in mood, always scanning for danger. This can lead to chronic anxiety, emotional numbing, or explosive anger outbursts. Boys often internalise that “anger is power,” so when they feel vulnerable or disrespected as men, they may unconsciously repeat their father’s patterns.
Identity and Masculinity
From a psychotherapeutic perspective, the violent father becomes a blueprint for masculinity. Boys often fear turning into their father, yet also absorb him as their model of what being a man looks like. This creates an internal conflict: “I don’t want to be like him, but I don’t know another way to be a man.” Many men either over-identify with the violent father (becoming controlling, aggressive, defensive), or they swing to the opposite extreme (passivity, avoidance of conflict, fear of fatherhood). Both are trauma-driven identities rather than chosen ones.
Internalised Shame and Self-Worth
A violent father doesn’t just attack the body, he attacks the boy’s sense of self. Psychologically, the boy often assumes, “I must have deserved this,” which turns into lifelong shame. Shame-driven men either collapse inward (depression, addictions, withdrawal) or project outward (anger, dominance, contempt). Therapy often reveals that the man isn’t just angry at his father, he’s also deeply angry at himself for being small, weak, or powerless as a child.
Relationships and Intimacy
In adulthood, these early patterns show up in intimate relationships. A man who grew up with a violent father may:
- Struggle with trust and vulnerability.
- Either avoid conflict completely or escalate quickly.
- Feel a constant need to prove himself in relationships.
- Fear becoming a father because he doesn’t want to “repeat the cycle.”
Clinically, we see higher risks of substance use, domestic violence perpetration, or choosing unhealthy partners as unconscious repetitions of childhood dynamics.
Legacy and Intergenerational Transmission
From both psychology and psychotherapy, the biggest risk is that the cycle repeats. Boys who grow up with violent fathers are statistically more likely to become violent themselves, but also more likely to become victims in adulthood. The unprocessed trauma doesn’t disappear, it gets replayed, either in their own parenting, their partnerships, or their self-destructive behaviours. Therapy is often the only place a man begins to break this unconscious inheritance.
If he hated what his father did to him, why on earth would he repeat it?
The answer lies in how trauma gets wired into the brain, body, and sense of identity.
Trauma Doesn’t Just Teach — It Imprints
Children don’t just learn from parents intellectually; they absorb them into their nervous system. A violent father doesn’t just “teach” a boy about aggression — he imprints aggression as part of how relationships work. Even if the boy consciously hates it, his body has learned that this is how men express power, resolve conflict, or maintain control. By adulthood, under stress, the body defaults back to what it knows, not what it wants.
Hatred Isn’t the Same as Healing
A boy can hate his father’s violence but never process the pain of it. If he grows up suppressing fear, shame, and anger, those emotions don’t vanish, they go underground. When triggered in adulthood (feeling disrespected, abandoned, or powerless), the unprocessed feelings erupt in the same form he once despised. This is why “hating it” isn’t enough; without self-reflection and therapy, the cycle continues.
Identification With the Aggressor
Psychodynamic theory explains this as “identification with the aggressor.” When you can’t stop the abuse, part of you unconsciously decides: If I become like him, I’ll be safer. It’s a survival mechanism. As a man, this identification can resurface: he doesn’t want to be his father, but when he feels vulnerable, he unconsciously steps into the role of the aggressor because it feels safer than being the helpless child again.
The Pull of Unresolved Shame
Shame is one of the most powerful drivers here. A boy grows up feeling weak, powerless, or “less than” in front of a violent father. As a man, when those old feelings get triggered, he may lash out violently to cover up the same shame. The violence isn’t really about his partner or child — it’s about defending against his own buried sense of powerlessness.
Repetition Compulsion
In psychotherapy, this is called repetition compulsion: unconsciously replaying old trauma in an attempt to master it. The boy becomes the father he hated because, at some deep level, he is still trying to work out the original wound — to be the one in control instead of the one controlled. But without awareness, he just repeats the pattern instead of resolving it. Lack of Alternative Models of Masculinity
Even if a boy swears he’ll never be like his dad, if he has no alternative models of healthy masculinity, he’s left with a void. Under stress, people fall back on what they know, not what they wish. Without role models, therapy, or supportive communities, “not being like dad” is not a plan — it’s just a wish.
In short: Men repeat what they hated not because they liked it, but because their nervous system, psyche, and sense of identity have been shaped by it. They’re replaying the only script they know, even while despising the role. Therapy helps men break the cycle by naming the shame, separating their identity from their father’s, and building a new model of manhood that isn’t based on fear or control.
Cassim