Conduct Disorder in Children: Definition, Symptoms, Causes, & Treatments

As a parent, you must worry about many things, including mental health. Mental health is essential, and if you help your kid develop properly, it will allow them to deal with different hardships and achieve tremendous success in all aspects of their lives.

Children can reach emotional, learning, and developmental milestones with proper mental health. They will get the necessary skills to deal with problems and have a positive outlook rather than adopting a defeatist mindset that makes it difficult to function at home, work, school, and society.

Let’s discuss one of the common mental issues kids have and help you understand it so you can take the necessary steps.

Here’s what you must know about conduct disorder.

Conduct disorder, or CD, is a mental problem that commonly affects teenagers and younger kids. Harmful actions toward others and aggressive behaviors characterize this condition. Kids with conduct disorder have violent patterns and often break social norms and rules.

Conduct disorder falls in the category of disruptive behavior disorders. Another common disruptive behavior disorder is oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), which can sometimes develop into conduct disorder.

Other mental disorders often accompany conduct disorder, including:

• Learning disorders
• ADHD
• Anxiety and depression
• PTSD
• Mood disorders
• Substance abuse
• Problematic smartphone use (PSU)

Kids with conduct disorder are violent and unkind. They hardly have any emotions toward other people’s feelings. It’s not a mere case of acting out or bullying, as this condition takes things further. Teenagers will often hurt other kids or animals, bully others, and lie recklessly.

Personality disorders disrupt thinking patterns, behavior, relationships, interactions, and mood over extended periods. These mental health conditions usually develop during early childhood and grow further once the person reaches adulthood.

That’s why people usually get a personality disorder diagnosis after 18. In some cases, psychiatrists don’t want to diagnose children with personality disorders because children can sometimes display symptoms of these conditions without having them.

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is an exception, as almost 80% of people show exact symptoms and get diagnosed around 11.

Conduct disorder is a mental health problem that usually happens to children, and even though it’s similar to ASPD, it rarely carries on into adulthood. Simply put, if you help your kid with conduct disorder on time, they won’t have the same issue in the future.

The problem with recognizing conduct disorder is that most “normal children” can have the same behavioral patterns and symptoms. However, regular children display these symptoms less frequently. Children with CD also have more disruptive relationships, difficulties adjusting to schools, and difficulties learning.

Here are some common types of behaviors kids with conduct disorder display.

Kids with conduct disorder are prone to arson, destroying property, breaking things, and generally not caring about other people’s things or even their own. Even though other children are also likely to display this behavior, it shouldn’t be a constant.

If a teenager has conduct disorder, they will willfully destroy things daily, which is when you should start worrying that something’s wrong.

Aggressive behavior or aggressive conduct includes a plethora of things. Those can be molestation, bullying, rape, forcing others into various actions, weapon use, animal cruelty, physical altercations, intimidation, etc.

Delinquent behavior includes all criminal actions people commit that go against the country’s or society’s current laws. Kids with conduct disorder don’t have a guilt system built with the rules and norms applicable in a civil society. In other words, they don’t care about laws and even less about breaking them.

The law doesn’t regulate all the rules we’ve set. Instead, society places and upholds them, creating norms. Of course, kids often break the norms but don’t do it consistently and severely.

Some of the violations of age-appropriate norms by kids with CD include engaging in sexual activity very early on, mischief, malicious pranks, running away from home, not going to school, and spending time with way older people.

All kinds of factors can directly or indirectly contribute to developing conduct disorder. Some are physical, and others are mental. Here are some leading causes of CD and how they contribute to developing this mental health problem.

Social and economic factors are critical when raising children and preserving their mental health. Poor living conditions affect both kids and parents. They often lead to parents treating their kids poorly and not caring for them. Even if parents can put their issues aside, children often feel social and economic stress.

That helps them understand things more quickly and start thinking about issues kids shouldn’t worry about. For kids, that usually leads to anger and rage toward society as they feel betrayed and rejected by the world.

Their peers often ostracize them, which deepens the issue and makes them want to get back at society and break the norms.

Many kids have difficulties adjusting to their school environment. They could have poor grades, and peers could ostracize, target, or bully them. All these negative factors connect to conduct disorder. Kids targeted by their teachers and constantly getting negative feedback will likely be more aggressive, reject authority, and break the norms.

They simply don’t want to conform to the rules and aren’t motivated to show their teachers they could be better. Instead, they want to prove they’re right and start acting worse. They embrace bad behavior and pursue it consciously to survive and defend themselves against their peers and society.

Kids with CD often come from unstable homes. First, numbers show that children with parents with a history of substance abuse are more likely to get conduct disorder. When parents have specific mental health issues themselves, those can translate to their kids and cause problems.

Parents with antisocial personality disorder, schizophrenia, mood disorders, and attention-deficit disorder have a higher chance of having kids with CD. A family home without the proper structure and supervision and with constant conflicts leads to maladaptive behavior that can cause CD.

Kids who are victims of abuse, beating, poor treatment, and violence can also get conduct disorder. That is especially true if their parents abuse them.

Even if a child doesn’t get repeat exposure to the same kind of abuse and violence a hostile environment, poor parenting, or school environment cause, they could suffer multiple traumatic experiences that trigger their predispositions for conduct disorder.

Here are some of the traumatic experiences that could lead to CD:

• Physical buse
• Separation from parents
• Sexual abuse
• Emotional abuse
• Neglect
• Bullying
• Exposure to violence

Many conduct disorder studies show that kids can genetically inherit CD characteristics. Those can include low responsiveness to punishment, breaking the rules, aggression, temperament, impulsive behavior, and antisocial behavior.

Elevated testosterone levels can cause aggression, triggering this condition in children with genetic predispositions. At the same time, various neurological issues, seizures, and brain injuries can cause this behavior and lead to extreme levels of aggression.

Frontal lobe damage is associated with conduct disorder because this part of the brain regulates the most considerable cognitive skills, including emotions, memory, and problem-solving. That is also the part of the brain that shapes your personality. With a damaged frontal lobe, people often experience:

• Lack of self-control
• Lack of impulse control
• Difficulties planning in the future
• Problems learning from past experiences

Cognitive impairment can be genetic, but an injury can also cause it. Kids can also inherit common personality traits associated with conduct disorder.

Recognizing conduct disorder symptoms is one thing, but you must get a professional opinion to determine whether your child is dealing with this issue. Children can be diagnosed with this problem if they show several signs mentioned earlier.

To get an accurate diagnosis, your kid must exhibit a similar pattern of symptoms over 12 months. Parents should talk to a psychiatrist to get a professional diagnosis. Psychiatrists make their diagnosis by talking to:

• The child
• Teachers
• Parents

They will also need to observe the kid’s behavior to diagnose accurately. When mental health professionals evaluate a child for conduct disorder, they start by ruling out other diagnoses and try to see if there are any co-occurring mental health issues.

Many conduct disorder symptoms and signs are similar to other disorders, and it’s crucial to determine the exact condition because treatments are different. In some cases, children can have co-occurring diagnoses as they might have CD along with PTSD, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, ADHD, etc.

You can choose from several treatments if your kid has been diagnosed with conduct disorder. Depending on the severity of the condition, your psychiatrist or psychologist can recommend one or a combination of the following conduct disorder treatments.

Social status and peer integration are often significant parts of conduct disorder. With group therapy, kids can adopt behaviors that emphasize empathy and develop better interpersonal skills, allowing them to function normally as a part of a larger group.

Patients with conduct disorder struggle to fit in with groups and feel like outsiders. With group therapy, they can learn how their actions affect others, help them handle conflict, and teach them how to act positively as group members.

This conduct disorder treatment method includes residential treatment centers and therapeutic schools. These institutions provide structured programs that can help manage and reduce disruptive behaviors. Community-based treatment includes coordinating multiple social, health, and non-specialist services to help kids with CD.

These treatments help kids develop the mental skills to manage their aggression, rage, and disruptive behaviors. They respond to various individual needs to ensure the best results.

Community institutions actively engage target populations, community members, and local organizations as a part of an extensive network to empower children to reduce the demand and need for custodial services and residential treatment for kids with CD.

Several psychotherapy treatments can help treat childhood conduct disorder. For example, individual cognitive behavioral therapy is a common choice because it focuses on improving the following:

• Learning skills that can help in school and with broad experiences;
• Conflict resolution towards strengthening essential relationships;
• Problem-solving skills.

These improvements can help negate the bad influences your kid is subjected to in their daily routine. Therapists look to encourage consistent behaviors in various situations to help children understand the consequences of their behavior and show how they can approach different scenarios without using unwanted behaviors.

Anger management treatments aim to reduce the emotions that lead to anger and the arousal it causes. It’s not about teaching your kid how to get rid of things that trigger them but teaching them to control their behavior in those situations and react appropriately.

Yes, therapists can teach kids how to avoid potentially dangerous situations, but it’s about reinforcing positive behaviors and helping kids deal with the overwhelming emotions leading to frustration.

They use cognitive restructuring techniques that help kids change their thoughts and replace angry thoughts with rational ones. They remind kids that getting angry doesn’t change or make them feel better and show how disruptive behavior will worsen things.

This treatment for conduct disorder doesn’t focus directly on children but helps them through better parenting. The goal is to teach parents how to enforce the proper discipline and rules while rewarding positive behaviors correctly.

For example, parents should recognize when their kid spends excessive time on their smartphone, which leads to replacing genuine relationships with online relationships. In these situations, they should use parental control apps and talk to their kids about the significance of spending time with their peers.

Specialists usually recommend parenting counseling as parents are often at least partly responsible for the situation. Proper parenting methods can help prevent future outbursts and problems, support their child’s current treatment, and improve overall results.

Even though conduct disorder can cause serious problems that might affect your child’s development and life in general, it isn’t a severe issue. It’s very treatable, and with regular treatment and adjusted parenting, you can help your kid deal with negative behaviors.