I work at a psychiatric hospital for children and teens. I work directly with the kids so I don’t get to meet parents often. We had a super sweet little girl on my unit once, they said it was because she assaulted her little 3 year old sister.
But the whole thing just didn’t make sense. I can read kids well and usually the ones that are violent and dangerous to family have a certain attitude. She just didn’t. She was meek, respectful and just overall the easiest patient I’d ever had.
When visitation came, her parents showed up and it all started to make sense. They would just berate her, for everything. Here is this little 9 year old girl and her mom is telling her she’s fucked up. Why can’t she be normal? etc etc. And this kid just took it.
Not for long though because I am allowed to remove the child at my discretion if I think it will make it worse for her and so I did. And promptly called CPS. It turns out that all the ‘abuse’ she was doing to her sister was just the mother abusing both of them and then blaming it on the little girl.
You will all be happy to know that she was moved in with her grandparents in a different state and is thriving and happy.