In the film Ordinary People, if readers remember that, it takes the death of the older son and the breakdown of the younger for the family to realize that the mother has been cold, withdrawn and angry for years. A fourth scenario is the united front family, where the spouses have stopped blaming each other for their own unhappiness and focused their energies on someone outside the marital system, frequently a child. A common script is that both parents are conflicted about sexuality. They have a distant, unsatisfactory sexual relationship but neither will discuss it with the other because each is afraid. As the female child in the family approaches adolescence mother begins to worry too much about how her daughter is going to express herself sexually.
Daughter picks up that something anxiety provoking but really fascinating is going on here.
What may begin as normal adolescent sexuality gets escalated because mother, and father too, get invested in trying to control the girl. They ground her, they listen to her phone calls, they read her diary, they try to limit who she can associate with. The family soon spends all its time worrying about the daughter's sexuality and the parents never have to worry about their own. You can take the same scenario we've been talking about with girls, moms, and sex, and apply it to boys, dads, and aggression. The harder the family tries to control the kid, the more his antisocial behavior escalates.