The discussion argues that in families in which adult conflicts escalate to violence, several central themes affect the way family members perceive and interact with each other. The family discourse includes three interrelated components: (1) recollection of what happened, (2) causality regarding why it happened, and (3) meaning. Most parenting activities include both framing expectations and scripting expectations. The child’s beliefs about reality in relation to parental expectation exist along the four parallel continua of awareness, competence, self-perception, and worldview. Three distinct profiles result from these continua as influenced by parental expectations: the master child, the vanquished child, and the uprooted child. Influences outside the family also affect the child’s perceptions. The analysis maintains that to acquire a holistic picture of a child’s experience of domestic assault, researchers need to examine the dimensions of mutual influence between the child and parents in terms of the extent of acknowledgment of the violence and levels of perceived competence, mastery, and self-perception. Using this framework has mapping, descriptive, and predictive potential if it receives proper support from empirical data. Figures, table, and 13 references