Childhood Conduct Problems in a Family Context

This article reviews research on the influence of a child's family context on the development of conduct problems. The first part of the article addresses what critical aspects of a child's family context seem to be related to the development of conduct problems and the second part addresses how these factors might have their effects on a child. In the first section, the many aspects of family functioning that have been studied are narrowed down into three specific dimensions that seem to be most consistently linked to conduct problems: parental psychological adjustment, parental marital adjustment, and parental socialization practices. In the second part, many different theories for explaining how these factors might play a role in the development of conduct problems are discussed and examples of each theory from existing research are provided. In a concluding section, the implications of this area of research to school psychologists, for both research and practice, are discussed.