Introduction <p>The purpose of this research was to work directly with children instigating child and adolescent to parent violence and abuse due to explosive and harmful impulsive, and parents experiencing such harms, to understand their help-seeking practices and experiences.</p> Methods <p>This work was a participatory action research project in which parents of children experiencing harm from their children, and children instigating these harms, were involved in separate semi-structured interviews and creative workshops. Children and parents analyzed their own workshop data, which was mapped onto critical incident chronologies and a socio-ecological map and the two analyzes were merged by the research assistant.</p> Results <p>Children want to feel a sense of belonging within their families but internalize the wider harmful narratives about themselves; children view parents as the most important people to help them navigate their harmful impulses. Parents also explained wider formal systems of support assumed parents should be expected to meet all support needs of their children. This was the case even when their children’s needs are significantly higher than children of the same chronological age due to trauma or neurodivergence.</p> Conclusions <p>Systems around the family should be responsive to parents’ help-seeking, supporting the parents so they can support their child. Parents and children demonstrated a variety of varied experiences from the same services, thus blanket approaches cannot be applied and should be led by an assessment of the whole family context including other children, wider family support, educational challenges</p>