Theresa Alexander Inman: Why Your Child Turns Aggressive

Theresa Alexander Inman answers the question parents are too ashamed to ask out loud. How normal is it for a child to hit, kick, or scream at the parent who is protecting them? Common enough, she says, that people should stop treating it as evidence they failed.

Theresa is a board certified behavior analyst and infant toddler developmental specialist, and the founder of Parenting Bytes. She works with children from birth onward, including kids diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and developmental delays, and she hosts the Parenting on the Spectrum podcast. She also spent years in domestic violence work after living through it herself, which is where a lot of this conversation lands.

Her frame is that behavior is never random. It has a function, and it sits inside a chain: what happened right before, the behavior itself, and how the adult responded after. Change the chain and the behavior changes. She asks parents to become detectives about it, keeping a short diary of what was said, how it was said, and what shifted in the room beforehand.

Theresa and Lisa work through the practical questions. Whether to call the police when a child gets physical, and what that does to a child's first impression of law enforcement, on top of how an ex will use it in a custody fight. What a child absorbs when a pregnancy is spent in a stressful home. Why a home with no visible conflict can leave a kid unable to handle any. And what a parenting coordinator's advice to sit together at the kids' events really teaches a child who already knows better. Near the end, Theresa talks about her own marriage, and what her three-year-old repeated in public years later.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why aggression from a child after separation is far more common than parents are told
• Every behavior has a function: how to read what happened before, during, and after
• Why "you're bad" and "you're good" are both judgments, and what to say instead
• What calling the police on your own child costs, and how an ex will weaponize it
• How stress during pregnancy reaches a baby, and why very young children are not immune
• Why homes with no visible conflict can leave kids unprepared for any conflict at all
• What sitting together at your child's events to look unified actually teaches them
• Taking care of yourself first, so you can stay calm enough to see what is happening

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 How common child aggression is, and why kids copy what they see
5:00 Why "good" and "bad" are judgments, and what to say instead
7:00 Teenagers: getting curious instead of correcting
9:00 The boy who punched a wall, and connecting before confronting
13:00 Whether to call the police on your own child
17:00 Stress before birth, and what small children absorb
21:00 Homes with no visible conflict, and what they fail to teach
23:00 Theresa's own story, and what her three-year-old remembered
25:00 Sitting together at your child's events to look united
28:00 Self-care first, and tracking what happens before the behavior
31:00 Where to find Theresa

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.