Abstract
Children with conduct disorder (CD) repeatedly violate the rights of others and the basic expectations of society, often exhibiting violent and destructive behaviors that cause great harm to others. Most of these children experience significant adversity in their personal lives, and many show severe deficits in multiple aspects of development and adjustment, including academic underachievement, emotional distress, and troubled interpersonal relationships (Lahey & Waldman, 2012). When CDs persist into adolescence and adulthood, they are extremely costly. Estimates suggest that a severely antisocial youth costs society two to five million dollars, considering the costs of justice system involvement and damages to victims (Cohen & Piquero, 2009), and the yearly cost of youth violence in the USA is estimated at $158 billion (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2008). As such, CD represents a serious public health problem, negatively affecting the children and adolescents involved and their families, schools, and communities.
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Bierman, K.L., Sasser, T.R. (2014). Conduct Disorder. In: Lewis, M., Rudolph, K. (eds) Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9608-3_24
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