ABNORMAL CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY

Times New Roman. 12pt Font. Double-spaced INTRODUCTION TO ABNORMAL CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY – ROBERTT WEIS EDITION 3 Chapter 9- Conduct Problems in Children and Adolescents 1. Television talk shows often feature drill sergeant–type individuals yelling in the faces of troubled children who likely meet criteria for conduct disorder. The crowd cheers when these children are taken to boot camps. Research studies support the efficacy of intensive, multimodal interventions for conduct disorder, yet these programs are fairly expensive and not all children have access to them. How would you persuade funding agencies to invest in these programs? Intensive multimodal interventions for conduct disorder programs are very essential for rehabilitating negative behaviors for children with conduct disorder. However, such programs are very expensive to implement and therefore the only a limited number of children can access them thus making the programs’ impact minimal and ineffective.

The funding agencies are always finding it challenging to fund such programs due to the huge amount of fund that is required to run the programs. The cost even becomes more costly as the condition worsen thus becoming difficult to control and manage at the family or school level. Understanding whether a conduct disorder in onset adolescent or onset childhood is important to the parent and teachers as plays a major part in developing appropriate approaches for interventions. Onset childhood conduct disorder would require family intervention at the early stage of development to avoid developing the complex condition in and negative behavior development in a child. Understanding onset adolescent conduct disorder plays a major role in understanding a child during his/her adolescent or teenage and taking the appropriate measures and interventions to ensure that the child develops positive behavior that facilitates learning.

Understanding both onset childhood and onset of adolescent conduct disorder is important for both teachers and parents to understand their role in influencing behavior changes in a child. a well-managed child with onset childhood disorder develops positive behavior practices thus becoming a responsible young adult in the society. How might academic underachievement perpetuate conduct problems? Conduct problem among children is associated with academic underachievement with such students displaying poor academic performance. Children with conduct disorder are known to have normal intelligence capacity but they end up recording lower performance than their peers in IQ tests. Such children rarely talk and have lower results in verbal IQ than performance IQ, suggesting a specific and pervasive deficit in language. Children who consistently record poor academic performance than their peers in the class have higher chances of developing conduct behavior as they struggle to resist the feeling of low self-esteem and prove themselves superior.

It is clear that children with conduct disorder develop school and learning problems which are characterized by a high rate of academic underachievement particularly in language and reading and grade retention. A child with anxiety displays shyness, inhibition, and fear which acts as a protective factor for conduct problem. Anxiety displayed by negative emotions and avoidance or withdrawal signs based on lack of caring about others increases the risk of conduct problem among school children. Conduct problems and disorders are antisocial behaviors linked to the immature form of thinking, cognitive deficiency, and cognitive distortion. Aggressive children thinking and behavior in social situations is deficient in one or more steps like encoding, interpretation, response search, response decision, and enactment. Difficulty experiences among school children and teenagers are associated with the development of conduct behavior.

Low emotional arousal leads to lack of empathy and they develop aggressive behavior which indicates a higher chance of developing an antisocial disorder. Stress and inferiority among peers may lead to the development of violence and antisocial behavior in a child who feels misrepresented in a certain social group. Other social functioning impairments associated with low emotional arousal leads to physiological reactivity as a result of emotionally distressing stimuli. This condition is common among school children facing life adversities associated with urban poverty. Provide an example of environmental structuring. Describe the components of multisystemic therapy.   Multisystem therapy is an intensive family and community-based treatment program designed to bring about positive changes in the various social systems (home, school, community, and peer relation), contributing to the serious anti-social behavior of children and adolescents who are at risk of out of home placement like group homes, foster care, residential care, correctional facilities, or hospitalization.

Most of the multisystem therapy involves housing individuals with conduct disorder in community-based mental health organization which is considered to be cultured into a more rehabilitative environment than punitive. The deputy juvenile officers, social welfare workers, parents, teachers, and guidance counselors work closely in improving children, adolescent, and family treatment goals. The characteristics of multisystem therapy include the ability of the staff members to work 24 hours a day throughout the season, flexibility schedule, and delivering of the services in the home to provide safety for the family, preventing violence, develop a joint working relationship between therapists and the family, provide the family with easier access to needed services, increasing the likelihood of the family to stay in treatment, and help the family maintain changes in behaviors.

The approaches address issues on solving problems associated with daily conflict caused by the disorderly nature of the child. the approach has enabled parents to learn strategies to monitor and promote children and adolescent school performance and vocational functioning. The intervention is therefore appropriate in facilitating the ability of a child to decrease his/her association with delinquent and peers using drugs during the childhood and adolescent stage. The provision of this therapy enabled a child to increase his relationship with positive peers and engage in positive activities and is associated with an improvement in school performance. Generally, multisystem therapy approach enabled a child to develop positive growth attributed in all dimensions during developments and avoid practices associated with conduct practices.