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Assessment of Inappropriate

Behavioral Development

It is far easier to measure a child's physical growth and maturation than to assess the complexities of individual differences in children's disruptive and antisocial development. Pediatricians can clearly record increases in a child's weight and height on growth charts and even provide percentile estimates indicating how a child compares to others at the same age. Measuring and interpreting acceptable versus unacceptable and normal versus abnormal behaviors among children and adolescents are far more complex.

Children and adolescents often test the limits of appropriate conduct by crossing the boundaries set by caretakers. When a youth exhibits a particular problem behavior, it is important to consider not only if the behavior has previously occurred, but also if it is exhibited in multiple settings and with what frequency, duration, intensity, and provocation. For example, a 2-year-old who playfully nips a playmate is less off the mark of developmentally appropriate behavior than a 4-year-old who aggressively and frequently bites playmates to forcefully gain possession of desired toys.

Among adolescents, a certain degree of misbehavior, experimentation, or independence seeking is common. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association (1994) indicates that "New onset of oppositional behaviors in adolescence may be due to the process of normal individuation." On the other hand, youth who persistently and progressively engage in problem behaviors with significant impairment in personal development, social functioning, academic achievement, and vocational preparation are of great concern to caretakers. Also of concern is the broad category of "antisocial behaviors" that have an appreciable harmful effect on others, in terms of inflicting physical or mental harm on others or causing property loss or damage.

The Semantics of Disruptive and Delinquent Behavior

A mother finds parenting exhausting and describes her 7-year-old son as extremely energetic, frequently switching from one play activity to another, often losing his things, and forgetting to do his chores. A second grade teacher notes that her student has a learning disability, as he is unruly, requires constant disciplinary attention, fidgets or squirms in his seat, fails to follow directions or complete assignments, refuses to wait his turn, and often disturbs his classmates. A child psychologist indicates a young boy lacks the ability for sustained mental effort, is easily distracted by extraneous stimuli, displays poor impulse control, and meets the criteria for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), as defined in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). The mother, teacher, and psychologist could all be speaking about the same 7-year-old boy, each from his/her own perspective. Research indicates that young boys with ADHD are at increased risk for subsequent involvement in other disruptive and delinquent behaviors (Hinshaw, 1987).

What is meant by disruptive behavior and delinquent behavior? According to parents, this may include disobedience, fighting with siblings, destroying or damaging property, stealing money from family members, demanding attention, threatening parents with violence, and keeping the household in an uproar.

Teachers and school principals find students' behavior unacceptable when it interrupts or disturbs classroom learning, violates the code of conduct in school, threatens the safety of faculty and students, and involves vandalism or theft. Students displaying such behaviors may be expelled, suspended, or placed in special, remedial, or alternative education programs. Many of these boys have been labeled emotionally disturbed, behaviorally disordered, learning disabled, handicapped, exceptional, or truant. The criteria for such labels vary across States and localities. Research has shown that students with learning disabilities and behavioral disorders are more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system and are more likely to be incarcerated (Leone, Rutherford, and Nelson, 1991).

Mental health practitioners consider a range of diagnostic labels as disruptive child behaviors, including hyperactivity/inattention; negativistic, oppositional, and defiant behavior; and conduct disorder that may involve aggression to people and animals, destruction of property, deceitfulness or theft, and serious violation of rules, such as those regarding curfews and school attendance (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

Among juvenile justice practitioners, the disruptive and delinquent behaviors of concern are legally defined as:

 Delinquent acts involving the destruction or stealing of property, commission of violent crimes against persons, possession or sale of alcohol or drugs, and illegal possession of weapons.

 Status offenses, which would not be considered an offense if committed by an adult, such as truancy, running away, alcohol possession or use, and curfew violations.

Children and youth are considered "beyond control" of the parents or guardians when their behavior is so poorly regulated that it requires the attention of the family court to establish adequate supervision of these dependent youth.

Considerable overlap exists among the more severe types of family disruption, many school disciplinary infractions, the mental health categories of conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder, and the justice categories of delinquent and status offenses and being beyond control. It is important to set aside labels based on the perspective of any single discipline and focus instead on the actual behaviors being described. Clearly, the semantics of disruptive behavior cross many disciplines.

Onset of Problem Behavior in Boys

At what age can the emergence of behavioral problems first be detected? In a review of developmental approaches to aggression and conduct problems, Rolf Loeber and Dale F. Hay (1994) described the emergence of both opposition to parents and aggression with siblings and peers as a natural occurrence during the first 2 years of life. As toddlers develop speech capacities, they are more likely to utilize words to resolve conflicts. In general, oppositional behaviors decline between ages 3 and 6, as children acquire more prosocial skills for expressing their needs and dealing with conflict.

Some toddlers and preschoolers distinguish themselves from the norm by committing acts of intense aggression, initiating hostile conflict rather than reacting when provoked, and generally being characterized by parents as having a difficult temperament rather than one of harmony and ease. In a study of 205 boys ages 10 to 16, mothers were asked to rate how easy or difficult it had been to get along with the child when he was 1 to 5 years old. Five years later, when the boys were 15 to 21 years old, those originally characterized by their mothers as "difficult" had an officially reported delinquency rate that was twice as high as that of the children characterized as "easy." The rate of self-reported delinquent acts committed by the "difficult" children was also significantly higher than that of the "easy" children. The researchers (Loeber, Stouthamer-Loeber, and Green, 1991) issued the following challenge to researchers and therapists:

 Develop better criteria for distinguishing between those preschoolers who are more or less likely to outgrow problem behavior.

 Improve intervention technologies that steer children away from a path of serious maladjustment.

Developmental Ordering of Problem Behavior

Manifestations of disruptive behaviors in childhood and adolescence are often age dependent, reflecting a developing capability to display different behaviors with age (Loeber, 1990). Figure 1 (below) shows the approximate ordering of the different manifestations of problem behaviors, including disruptive and delinquent behaviors, from early childhood through adolescence.

After birth, the earliest problem noted is generally the infant's difficult temperament. Although activity level is one dimension of temperament, hyperactivity becomes more apparent when children are able to walk. Overt conduct problems, such as aggression, are usually not recognized until age 2 or later, when the child's mobility and physical strength have increased. During the preschool years, the quality of the child's social contacts becomes evident, including excessive withdrawal or poor relationships with peers and/or adults. Academic problems rarely emerge clearly before the child attends first or second grade. Beginning at elementary school age and continuing through early adolescence, covert or concealing conduct problems, such as truancy, stealing, and substance use, become more apparent. Because the age of criminal responsibility in most States is 12 years, children are less often arrested prior to that age. For youth age 12 and older, the prevalence of delinquency and associated recidivism increases.

Figure 1 highlights the fact that a child can exhibit considerable continuity in disruptive and antisocial behaviors, even though the behaviors are manifested differently with increasing age. Children's development toward serious deviant behavior can be thought of as leading to diversification of behaviors, rather than replacement of one problem behavior with another. Few children progress to the most serious behaviors or accumulate the largest variety of such problems. It is more common for children to penetrate the deviancy continuum to a lesser degree, reach a plateau, or reverse to a less serious level.



Increases in Problem Behaviors as a Function of Failure in Developmental Tasks

Children need to acquire several prosocial developmental tasks to counterthe development of disruptive and delinquent behavior. These developmental tasks are the counterparts of the manifestations of disruptive and delinquent child behavior (see figure 2): nonaggression versus aggression, honesty versus deception, and respect versus conflict with authority figures.



Probably the first relevant developmental task encountered by children is learning to solve interpersonal problems nonaggressively, that is, without verbal or physical aggression. Parents and teachers are the principal models for this developmental task, but other relatives, neighbors, and peers may also play a role. Although mastering this developmental task often starts during the preschool years, for some children the acquisition of interpersonal problem-solving skills continues in subsequent years.

As children's cognitive and verbal abilities increase during the preschool period, they become ready to master the developmental task of being honest. Honesty, which is the counter to lying and deception, is essential to increasing prosocial behavior in youngsters. Somewhere around this time, children also start to learn to respect other people's property and to distinguish between what is "mine" and "yours."

Alongside these developments, children need to learn to respect authority figures, such as parents and teachers. This process typically starts during the preschool years and continues throughout childhood and adolescence. However, as maturation continues, it is natural for children to become more independent from adult caretakers. There is considerable disagreement about the best timing for such independence, with many children wanting to achieve it earlier than their parents want them to. However, educators tend to agree that precocious independence often puts children at risk for later delinquency.

The researchers see children's failures to master these developmental tasks and to acquire other prosocial skills reflected in these tasks as breeding grounds for the development of disruptive and delinquent behavior. Therefore, many youth who eventually become seriously and chronically delinquent somewhere during childhood and adolescence probably missed opportunities to learn one or more key prosocial behaviors.

The acquisition of prosocial developmental tasks is not always smooth. Young children initially respond to developmental tasks utilizing a trial-and-error approach. Older children who have successfully mastered these developmental tasks are also more likely to employ more advanced strategies for problem solving. However, children, like adults, may counter the challenge of new tasks by falling back on former coping strategies, even ones that are disruptive or delinquent. Some youth who have apparently outgrown what would be considered normal problem behavior at a younger age may revert to these behaviors (e.g., oppositional behavior and lying) when faced with new developmental tasks in areas such as schooling and employment.

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