Background:

Child-to-parent violence is a family issue that needs a systemic and integral approach for its evaluation. The main objective of this longitudinal study was to assess the moderating effects of adolescents' borderline personality and psychopathic traits (grandiose-manipulative, callous-unemotional, and impulsive-irresponsible dimensions) in the predictive association between inadequate parental strategies (psychological aggression, corporal punishment, and ignoring misbehavior) and child-to-parent violence. Sex differences were analyzed.

Method:

The community sample comprised 671 adolescents aged from 12 to 17 years old (Mage = 13.39, SD = 1.15; 50.8% girls, 47.7% boys, and 1.5% non-binary), assessed twice, six months apart from each other.

Results:

Results showed slightly different patterns of violence towards fathers and mothers – ignoring misbehavior predicted aggression toward mothers, while psychological aggression predicted aggression toward fathers. Moderation analyses showed that the predictive association from ignoring misbehavior to both child-to-father violence (CFV) and child-to-mother violence (CMV) was only significant for adolescents who were high in the psychopathic trait of callous-unemotional, and the predictive association from psychological aggression to CFV was only significant in those adolescents who scored low in the borderline personality trait. Some sex specificities emerged.

Conclusions:

These findings support the relevance of working on parents' discipline strategies and add the need to work on adolescents' emotional regulation to prevent or deal with child-to-parent violence.