How and Why Do Children Develop Conduct Disorder?
The diagnosis of CD is heterogeneous; children can show more than 32,000 combinations of symptoms and still meet the criteria of CD. It is unlikely there will be one set of factors leading to “the” disorder. One line of research is to identify subgroups to delineate different types that might reveal patterns leading to one variation or another. For example, CD that emerges in childhood is more likely to be associated with very aggressive behavior and is more common among boys; CD that emerges in adolescence is more likely to include vandalism and property destruction and to be equally distributed among boys and girls (Moffitt & Caspi, 2005). There is progress in understanding CD and how it may emerge. Some of the progress has come from abandoning traditional views which proposed that children were “acting out” internal conflicts or thwarted psychological development or that the children were expressing complex family dynamics (e.g., mixed roles and communications in the home). Advances
