An understanding of escalation processes is crucial to any confrontation with violence. Escalation processes, as we saw in Chapter 1, are of two kinds: reciprocal and complementary. In parent–child relations, these two types of escalation intensify each other, and an ongoing swing between giving in and hitting out has been shown to be a common characteristic of families with violent and self-destructive children (Bugental et al., 1989; Dishion et al., 2016). In this chapter, we attempt to trace the processes that fuel these two types of escalation and suggest possible ways of averting them.