Dark chocolate is low in sugar, full of antioxidants and has been shown to be good for your heart and brain. These health benefits are likely why one-third of adults say it’s their preferred chocolate, so you might think it’s a great treat for their kids, too.
But pediatricians and nutritionists say there are a few things to know before doling out dark chocolate to your little ones.
“It would be recommended that the child not eat dark chocolate in excess and avoid providing it before bed,” Amy Reed, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, told HuffPost.
The main reason is that dark chocolate contains caffeine, she explained.
While there’s no harm for most kids to eat some dark chocolate (and any other kind of chocolate), moderation is key, explained Anet Piridzhanyan, a clinical dietitian in the Center for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
“All foods, including candy, have a place at the table,” she told HuffPost. But here’s what you should know about giving your kids dark chocolate.
How much caffeine is in dark chocolate — and is it too much for kids?
An ounce of dark chocolate with 60-69% cacao contains 24 mg of caffeine, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s about the same amount as a quarter cup of coffee, Beth Natt, system medical director of pediatrics at Atlantic Health System, told HuffPost.
“Small amounts are likely to be well tolerated,” she said. But larger amounts could bring side effects similar to what adults experience when they have too much caffeine: difficulty sleeping, anxiety, diarrhea, vomiting and elevated heart rate and blood pressure.
As a stimulant, caffeine often has a bigger impact on growing bodies than on
adults, added Piridzhanyan. The Food and Drug Administration recommends that adults limit their caffeine intake to 400 mg a day — but the agency doesn’t have recommendations for kids.
The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests kids avoid caffeine, Natalie Rine, director of the Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, told HuffPost. The Canadian Paediatric Society agrees with that recommendation, but since caffeine is found in many foods and beverages, Health Canada has published healthy daily caffeine limits by age:
Kids 4-6 years: less than 45 mg (the equivalent of about 2 ounces of dark chocolate)
Kids 7-9 years: less than 62.5 mg
Kids 10-12 years: less than 85 mg
Kids 13 and older: less than 2.5 mg per kilogram of body weight
Adults: less than 400 mg
“If a child is eating dark chocolate in excess, then they could be consuming excess amounts of caffeine,” Reed said. Most likely, they’re not getting all their caffeine from dark chocolate, though, Natt added.
CLIMATEWIRE | The day after President Donald Trump won back the White House, the leaders of a climate action coalition backed by Apple and hundreds of other corporate giants put out defiant statement vowing to “fight for the future Americans demand and deserve.”
The message from the America Is All In coalition last November was a rebuke of Trump, who had campaigned on undoing the Biden administration’s historic efforts to reduce U.S. reliance on oil, gas, and coal.
But as Trump’s second administration started to take shape in the weeks after the election — with conservative firebrands picked to lead agencies like the Department of Justice and the Office of Management and Budget — the tone softened from America Is All In, and its top corporate supporters stepped back from the group.
None of the coalition’s leading technology, retail or industrial companies signed the group’s open letter in December reaffirming its commitment to the Paris Agreement, the international climate pledge the coalition was created to defend. The nonsigners included Walmart, Siemens and Apple, the world’s most valuable company, whose policy chief Lisa Jackson was co-chair of the coalition at the time. She stepped down as chair in January, the same month that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended Trump’s inauguration.
Corporate leaders’ retreat from public climate advocacy doesn’t mean companies have abandoned their environmental goals, experts said, but top executives are afraid to talk about those targets in a conservative-dominated Washington. Trump has once again moved to exit the Paris Agreement, eviscerated dozens of climate programs, fired thousands of federal workers, and rooted out diversity initiatives.
“People are pretty freaked out,” said Kaya Axelsson, an American research fellow at the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford, where she works with executives and regulators on climate targets. “Being loud and proud might be risky for companies right now.”
America Is All In didn’t answer questions about its disengaged corporate membership.
“The benefits of clean energy investments are undeniable for American communities and businesses, and America Is All In is determined to make sure they continue,” Elizabeth Lien, the coalition’s program director, said in an email. “We’re making sure the U.S. stays all in on a clean energy future.”
Apple noted that Jackson and the company remain active in the coalition.
“Lisa is proud to continue her leadership with America Is All In as part of the Leaders Circle,” Apple spokesperson Sean Redding said in a one-line statement.
Walmart and Siemens didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Who is still in?
Originally known as We Are Still In, the coalition launched in June 2017 after Trump first announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, the international deal involving nearly 200 nations that seeks to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook (center) seen behind U.S. President Donald Trump (right) and U.S. Vice President JD Vance (left) after the two were sworn into office at an inauguration ceremony in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol on January 20, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images
After delivering a keynote to an audience of district managers and C-Suite leaders, several attendees came up to me afterward to talk about how I balance leadership responsibilities with being a parent. Interestingly, it was a group of five men, and their questions prompted me to write this entire article.
“How do your leadership philosophies shape your parenting style?” he asked me.
“It’s simple,” I replied. “The philosophies are the same.”
I shared that as both a leader and a mother, one of my greatest ambitions is to empower the people around me. To me, leadership, whether at home or at work, isn’t just about strategy and execution; it’s about fostering resilience, encouraging critical thinking and nurturing confidence.
Another leader asked, “Can you share some of the things you teach your clients and your kids?”
And this is what I shared.
The first is: Embrace mistakes as opportunities to grow
In our home, my husband and I see mistakes as learning moments. We both feel strongly about having children who feel they can run to us when they make a mistake — not run from us. To do this, we make it a point to acknowledge our own mistakes openly, demonstrating to our kids that this is a safe space and showing that taking accountability is a strength, not a weakness.
This lesson extends beyond the home — whether in the workplace or the boardroom, creating a culture where people can learn from mistakes leads to stronger, more innovative teams. I’ll never forget when a teacher told me our oldest daughter walked into school and proudly shouted to the entire class, “My mom makes a lot of mistakes!”
The second is: Be curious before you point fingers
A pivotal moment in my parenting journey was when a member of my team posted to LinkedIn announcing the launch of a new product. The only problem with that move was that we weren’t planning on announcing the product quite yet. We had a marketing plan in place, social media posts in the works, and a landing page that wasn’t live. I was in the kitchen when my phone started buzzing with all of these alerts congratulating me, and I had no idea. Then I saw the post. And my stomach dropped. I just kept saying, “Oh no… oh no…” My daughter was next to me and saw I was upset.
“Are you going to fire him?” She asked.
“No,” I said. “I need to figure out what he was thinking when he made this decision so we can talk about it.”
Before bedtime, my daughter could see I wasn’t myself.
“What are you going to do?” she asked me.
“I’m going to try to find the silver lining.”
She asked what that meant, and I explained it.
When you find the silver lining, if you find something else that’s good on top of that, will that be your gold lining?” she inquired.
“You know what? It should be,” I said. “Once I find the silver lining, I’m going to try the gold lining for sure.”
She then asked, “Did all of the people who know you see this post?”
“No,” I said.
“Then the silver lining can be that you still have a lot of people to tell.”
And she fell asleep.
In parenting, when my kids make a mistake, we don’t ask, “Why did you do that?!” We choose to take a step back and ask, “What were you thinking?” In work scenarios, I’ve found approaching situations with curiosity before blame leads to constructive conversations and deeper understanding. My team and I grew stronger from this misstep, and my daughter got to see what it looks like to take a step back and understand a mistake before making any major decisions. She also learned the valuable skill of finding the good in things — even when that feels hard.
The third is: Prioritize effort over outcome
Success isn’t defined solely by results — it’s about the dedication and perseverance behind them. When my daughter proudly presents a project she has worked on, I focus on the effort.
The world is divided by war. Influenza outbreaks smolder in livestock herds and bird flocks for years. The public is deeply skeptical of the value of medical interventions. Public health agencies offer misleading advice and are focused only on keeping the public calm. There is a shortage of qualified medical professionals, with no end in sight.
No, this isn’t 2025—it’s 1918. In the pivotal book The Great Influenza, historian John Barry lays out the conditions that primed the population of the U.S. that year for one of the worst plagues in history and acted like so much dry tinder just waiting for a spark. That spark exploded into the conflagration of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and left many others disabled.
A little more than a century later, now is perhaps as good a time as any to ask the question: How prepared are we for another influenza pandemic? On the surface, this is an easy question to answer. Modern medicine and public health have advanced far beyond 1918. Whereas the scientists of that era struggled to identify the germ that caused the pandemic, we live in a time of genomic sequencing and global infectious disease surveillance, of mRNA vaccine technology and antiviral medications. Our governments have pandemic preparedness plans, stockpiles of vaccines and drugs, and, having dealt with the COVID pandemic, experience with contact tracing and isolation.
Other conditions, however, are eerily similar to those of 1918. Geopolitical crises crowd public health concerns off the front page of newspapers. A dangerous influenza strain, in this case the H5N1 avian flu virus, has recently been circulating freely within poultry flocks, spreading widely in livestock herds in the U.S. and causing infections in farm workers. False lessons drawn from the COVID pandemic have driven public skepticism of medical information to all-time highs. Public health agencies sometimes offer contradictory and falsely soothing messages, further eroding their credibility. And after five years of COVID, hospital systems are stretched thin, and burnout and staffing shortages have thinned the ranks of the doctors and nurses who will be on the front line of the next pandemic. Making matters worse, the Trump administration’s interventions over the past two months have gravely weakened surveillance of and control over the virus’s spread.
The global response to the COVID pandemic offers little solace. In late 2019, as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, gripped China, infectious disease surveillance failed across much of the rest of the globe. Western governments faltered right out of the gate at limiting the spread of the virus—contact tracing detected fewer than 2 percent of all COVID cases in the U.S., for example. The pandemic response plan was ignored, and molecular tests were too few and too late. There were not enough high-quality masks, and antiviral drugs for COVID had not yet been developed. The plan was to “flatten the curve,” but in practice, hospitals ran out of beds, intensive care units ran out of oxygen and morgues ran out of space. While lives were saved by social distancing and eventually vaccines, millions also died needlessly across the globe. They were victims of poor pandemic policy and a sluggish public health response, as well as misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and other health measures.
But that was—and still is—a different pandemic, one caused by a coronavirus rather than influenza, with a far lower death rate for acute cases and a somewhat different set of challenges. In contrast, when pandemic influenza hit in 1918, it killed 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population, and around half of those deaths were in young and healthy people. A pandemic similar in scale today would leave 200 to 400 million dead.
Revisiting the Deadly 1918 Pandemic
It’s hard to imagine now, but the 1918 influenza was far worse than the flu we know. Although many affected people experienced a severe bout of seasonal flu—fever, chills, body aches and headaches, followed by recovery—some fared a lot worse. As Barry puts it, these people “came with an extraordinary array of symptoms, symptoms either previously unknown entirely in influenza or experienced with previously unknown intensity.” Those symptoms included agonizing joint pain, burning pain above the diaphragm, subcutaneous emphysema (which occurs when pockets of air accumulate just beneath the skin), ruptured eardrums, kidney failure and severe nosebleeds.
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Dead birds are collected along the coast in the Vadso municipality of Finnmark in Norway following a major outbreak of bird flu on July 20, 2023. Oyvind Zahl Arntzen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images
What does an eclipse look like from the moon? Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander just sent back a stunning image from the lunar surface.
The commercial space company’s lander, which touched down on the moon without a hitch on March 2 as part of a mission for NASA, took a high-definition image of the eclipse from its top deck in the early hours of Friday — and it’s mighty beautiful.
“Blue Ghost got her first diamond ring! Captured at our landing site in the Moon’s Mare Crisium around 3:30 am CDT, the photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth,” Firefly Aerospace wrote online. (A “diamond ring” effect happens during a total solar eclipse when the sun just begins to appear from behind Earth; it also happens just before Earth totally blocks the sun.)
From our perch on Earth, it was a total lunar eclipse, and from the moon it was a total solar eclipse. These unique events happen when the sun, Earth, and moon align, allowing Earth to cast a shadow on the moon and block most sunlight from reaching the lunar surface. But our planet’s atmosphere still allows red wavelengths of light to squeeze through and travel through space, illuminating the moon in reddish, rusty, orangish, or crimson colors.
According to the company, it’s “the first time in history a commercial company will be actively operating on the Moon and able to observe a total solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface.”
Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 launched on Jan. 15 and landed on the moon on March 2 after a 45-day trip — and the photos Blue Ghost has been sending back are breathtaking. In the above photo, you can also see the Blue Ghost lander’s NASA equipment, including a Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager, Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder mast, and X-band antenna.
.Blue Ghost moon lander just beamed back stunning photo of the eclipse
An Australian man in his forties has become the first person in the world to leave hospital with an artificial heart made of titanium. The device is used as a stopgap for people with heart failure who are waiting for a donor heart, and previous recipients of this type of artificial heart had remained in US hospitals while it was in place.
The man lived with the device for more than three months until he underwent surgery to receive a donated human heart. The man is recovering well, according to a statement from St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, where the operations were conducted.The Australian is the sixth person globally to receive the device, known as BiVACOR, but the first to live with it for more than a month.
“This is certainly an important development in the field,” says Julian Smith, a cardiac surgeon at the Victorian Heart Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
“It is incredibly innovative,” says Sarah Aitken, a vascular surgeon at the University of Sydney, but she adds that there are still many unanswered questions about the level of function that people with it can achieve and the ultimate cost of the device. “This kind of research is really challenging to do because it is very expensive” and the surgery involved is very high-risk, says Aitken.
The latest success will help researchers to understand how people cope with this device in the real world, says Joseph Rogers, a heart-failure cardiologist and president of the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. “They weren’t being constantly monitored by medical teams,” says Rogers, who led the first trial of the device in the United States last year.
In all cases, the BiVACOR was used as a temporary measure before a donor heart became available. Some cardiologists say that it could become a permanent option for people not eligible for transplants because of their age or other health conditions, although the idea still needs to be tested in trials. In the United States, close to 7 million adults live with heart failure, but only about 4,500 heart transplants were performed in 2023, in part because of a shortage of donors.
Suspended rotor
BiVACOR was invented by biomedical engineer Daniel Timms, who founded a company named after the device, with offices in Huntington Beach, California and Southport, Australia.
The device is a total heart replacement and works as a continuous pump in which a magnetically suspended rotor propels blood in regular pulses throughout the body. A cord tunnelled under the skin connects the device to an external, portable controller that runs on batteries by day and can be plugged into the mains at night.
Many mechanical heart devices support the left side of the heart, and typically work by pooling blood in a sack, which flexes some 35 million times a year to pump blood. But these devices have many parts and often suffer failures. BiVACOR, which only has one moving part, will in theory experience fewer problems of mechanical wear, says Rogers.
US trials
The Australian recipient of BiVACOR had severe heart failure, and received the titanium device in a six-hour operation in November. In February, he was discharged from hospital, stayed in a residence close by and led a relatively normal life. In March, he received a donor heart.
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The BiVACOR is a total heart replacement made of titanium. Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Imagine a world where everyone had brown skin. Tens of thousands of years ago, that was the case, say scientists at Pennsylvania State University. So, how did white people get here? The answer lies in that tricky component of evolution known as a genetic mutation.
Out of Africa
Scientists have long known that Africa is the cradle of human civilization. There, our ancestors shed most of their body hair around 2 million years ago, and their dark skin protected them from skin cancer and other harmful effects of UV radiation. When humans began leaving Africa 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, a skin-whitening mutation appeared randomly in a sole individual, according to a 2005 Penn State study. That mutation proved advantageous as humans moved into Europe. Why? Because it allowed the migrants increased access to vitamin D, which is crucial to absorbing calcium and keeping bones strong.
“Sun intensity is great enough in equatorial regions that the vitamin can still be made in dark-skinned people despite the ultraviolet shielding effects of melanin,” explains Rick Weiss of The Washington Post, which reported on the findings. But in the north, where sunlight is less intense and more clothing must be worn to combat the cold, melanin’s ultraviolet shielding could have been a liability.
Just a Color
This makes sense, but did scientists identify a bonafide race gene as well? Hardly. As the Post notes, the scientific community maintains that “race is a vaguely defined biological, social, and political concept…and skin color is only part of what race is—and is not.”
Researchers still say that race is more of a social construct than a scientific one because people of purportedly the same race can have as many differences in their DNA as people of separate so-called races do. It’s also difficult for scientists to determine where one race ends and another begins, considering that people of supposedly different races may have overlapping features in terms of hair color and texture, skin color, facial features, and other characteristics.
Members of Australia’s aboriginal population, for example, sometimes have dark skin and blond hair of various textures. They share traits with people of African and European ancestry alike, and they are far from the only group not to fit squarely into any one racial category. Scientists posit that all people are roughly 99.5% genetically identical.
The Penn State researchers’ findings on the skin-whitening gene1 show that skin color accounts for a minuscule biological difference between humans.
“The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome—the complete instructions for making a human being,” the Post reports.
Skin Deep
When the research was first published, scientists and sociologists feared that the identification of this skin-whitening mutation would lead people to argue that whites, Blacks, and others are somehow inherently different. Keith Cheng, the scientist who led the team of Penn State researchers, wants the public to know that’s not so. He told the Post, “I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who look different.”
His statement captures what racial prejudice is in a nutshell. Truth be told, people may look different, but there’s virtually no difference in our genetic makeup. Skin color really is just skin deep.
Not So Black and White
Scientists at Penn State continue to explore the genetics of skin color. In a 2017 study published in the journal Science, 2 researchers report their findings of even greater variants in skin color genes among native Africans.
The same appears to be true of Europeans, given that, in 2018, researchers used DNA to reconstruct the face of the first British person, an individual known as the “Cheddar man” who lived 10,000 years ago. The scientists who took part in the reconstruction of the ancient man’s face say that he most likely had blue eyes and dark brown skin. While they do not know for sure what he looked like, their findings dispute the idea that Europeans have always had light skin.
Such diversity in skin color genes, says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff, the lead author of the 2017 study, likely means that we can’t even speak of an African race, much less a white one. As far as people are concerned, the human race is the only one that matters.
In 2025, there have been at least three measles outbreaks in the U.S. The biggest outbreak to date is in Texas, with 198 cases, resulting in 23 hospitalizations and one death of a school-aged child, as of March 7, 2025.1 This child had not received the measles vaccine and had no underlying health conditions.
Unfortunately, amid these scary outbreaks, some misinformation about measles treatments and prevention has also been spreading—specifically, the idea that vitamin A can be used to treat and prevent measles.
This has led the the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to recently release online statements warning parents not to rely on vitamin A for measles prevention, and that too much vitamin A can be dangerous for children.
The AAP emphasizes, “measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination remains the most important tool for preventing measles.” The AAP also underscores how extremely contagious the measles is, noting the virus can remain in the air as many as two hours after someone infected has left the vicinity. As such, their focus is on the importance of vaccination as the primary preventative tool for measles.
Vaccines Are the Best Way To Prevent Measles
Therese Linnon, DO, a pediatrician at Akron Children’s Hospital says while vitamin A can be used to help with some symptoms of the measles once a patient has been diagnosed, it is far better to prevent the infection in the first place by getting the measles vaccine.
“Vitamin A should not be a replacement for the vaccine. There is no dose of vitamin A that will protect them from getting the measles virus,” she explains.
Mahvash Madni, MD, a pediatrician and spokesperson for the AAP agrees, referencing the hundreds of measles-related child deaths in the U.S. every year, prior to the existence of a vaccine.
“Nutrition and a strong immune system are important in helping prevent disease but certain viruses that are very powerful can overwhelm the immune system regardless of our best efforts,” she says. “Measles is one of these viruses. That is why years of research and effort went into coming up with an extremely safe and effective vaccine which was put into effect decades ago.
As per CDC guidelines, the current measles vaccine—the MMR vaccine—should be given in two doses. The first dose should be given when a child is 12-15 months, and the second dose should be given between 4 and 6 years. Two doses of MMR vaccine is 97% effective against measles infections.
Can Vitamin A Be Used To Treat Measles?
First of all, it’s important to understand that the measles isn’t just a virus that causes an annoying rash.
“Children feel and look very ill,” explains Dr. Madni. “It can cause pneumonia, neurological problems like encephalitis and death.”
As Dr. Madni and the CDC note, for every 1,000 children who get the measles, between one and three of them will die.
Moreover, Dr. Madni emphasizes, there are no treatments or “cures” for the measles. “It has to run its course like most viruses,” she says. So why do some people suggest supplementing with vitamin A?
Ukraine’s mineral wealth has been a key factor in its negotiations with the U.S. as the two countries work out details for a ceasefire agreement in Ukraine’s war with Russia.
After a rocky start to those negotiations, officials from the U.S. and Ukraine announced an agreement on March 11, 2025. The U.S. would resume support and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, with some conditions, and both agreed to work toward “a comprehensive agreement for developing Ukraine’s critical mineral resources to expand Ukraine’s economy and guarantee Ukraine’s long-term prosperity and security.”
The initial announcement from Ukraine’s government stated that critical minerals would also “offset the cost of American assistance,” but that line was removed from the joint statement. Getting Russia to agree to a ceasefire would be the next step.
There’s no doubt that Ukraine has an abundance of critical minerals, or that these resources will be essential to its postwar reconstruction. But what exactly do those resources include, and how abundant and accessible are they?
The war has severely limited access to data about Ukraine’s natural resources. However, as a geoscientist with experience in resource evaluation, I have been reading technical reports, many of them behind paywalls, to understand what’s at stake. Here’s what we know.
Ukraine’s minerals fuel industries and militaries
Ukraine’s mineral resources are concentrated in two geologic provinces. The larger of these, known as the Ukrainian Shield, is a wide belt running through the center of the country, from the northwest to the southeast. It consists of very old, metamorphic and granitic rocks.
A multibillion-year history of fault movement and volcanic activity created a diversity of minerals concentrated in local sites and across some larger regions.
A second province, close to Ukraine’s border with Russia in the east, includes a rift basin known as the Dnipro-Donets Depression. It is filled with sedimentary rocks containing coal, oil, and natural gas.
Before Ukraine’s independence in 1991, both areas supplied the Soviet Union with materials for its industrialization and military. A massive industrial area centered on steelmaking grew in the southeast, where iron, manganese and coal are especially plentiful.
By the 2000s, Ukraine was a significant producer and exporter of these and other minerals. It also mines uranium, used for nuclear power.
In addition, Soviet and Ukrainian geoscientists identified deposits of lithium and rare earth metals that remain undeveloped.
However, technical reports suggest that assessments of these and some other critical minerals are based on outdated geologic data, that a significant number of mines are inactive due to the war, and that many employ older, inefficient technology.
That suggests critical mineral production could be increased by peacetime foreign investment, and that these minerals could provide even greater value than they do today to whomever controls them.
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Granite being mined on February 26, 2025, in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine. Despite the ongoing war, many mining companies across the country have continued their operations, extracting resources such as titanium, graphite, and beryllium. bKostiantyn Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images
Erin knows her three children haven’t had an easy time. When they were growing up, her partner was abusive towards her and the children witnessed violence and coercion at home before she found the strength to end the relationship. A few years later, her child Jay – then in their early teens – disclosed that a trusted adult had sexually abused them.
Erin, a successful businesswoman, has always believed Jay. She reported the abuse to police and severed ties with the alleged perpetrator. But Jay’s behaviour began to change. They threw knives at Erin. They set fires in the house. “They would use anything as a weapon to cause injury and harm,” Erin says. Often, Erin was forced to barricade herself inside her bedroom when Jay tried to attack her, while the other children fled the house. In many ways, she felt as if she was living with her abusive ex again.
When Erin was with her ex, she knew there was help available for victims of domestic abuse. But when she sought support for Jay’s behaviour, she felt as if she was hitting a brick wall. A mental health assessment concluded that Jay was not struggling with any psychological conditions. Social workers focused on how Erin could improve her parenting and downplayed the severity of Jay’s behaviour. Eventually, afraid that Jay would kill her, or one of her other children, Erin begged her local authority to take Jay into care. It wasn’t until Jay made a credible attempt to kill one of their siblings that she succeeded.
Erin didn’t know it at the time, but Jay’s behaviour towards her had a name – or rather, lots of names. Among other terms, it is called filial violence, child-to-parent abuse or child-against-parent aggression. There is no legal definition but the national domestic abuse charity Respect uses the acronym Capva (Child and Adolescent to Parent Violence and Abuse) as a term to describe a person aged between eight and 18 who engages in “harmful and repeated” abusive behaviour. This might include physical violence, sexual and economic abuse or “emotional, coercive or controlling behaviour”.
Over the last two decades, interest in Capva has risen steadily among academics, social workers and practitioners in sectors including domestic abuse, adoption and mental health services. The pandemic saw a surge in reported cases and today, specialist services working to address child-to-parent abuse report that they cannot keep up with demand. A storyline about this issue even featured in EastEnders in 2024, as Kat Slater struggled to cope with the increasingly violent behaviour of her teenage son Tommy. A new report by Femicide Census on more than 170 UK mothers killed by their sons (of all ages) in the past 15 years observed that mothers were sometimes considered a “safe space” for children to mete out violence.
Parents will reach out to their family and friends and get a response that’s quite shaming.
But this gradual growth in awareness has yet to translate into families getting the support they need. In a landmark survey by Respect, British parents shared their experiences of Capva. The survey report paints a picture of desperate parents punched in the face so they need stitches; attacked with knives and other weapons; suffering heart attacks due to the stress of their situations. It also highlights the silence, stigma and lack of understanding that surround child-to-parent abuse. More than half of parents experiencing Capva told Respect they had not sought support at all; of these, 68% said this was because they were ashamed or worried about the stigma or judgment from professionals.
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Composite: Guardian Design; Laura Fay; Justin Paget/Getty Images
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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James' World 2 