Here are some different examples and case studies of disturbed children. It will give you a better idea of what these kids are like and some of the different psychological and behavioral problems they present with.
Examples of disturbed kids
An 8-year-old boy exhibits serious disturbances. His struggles became evident by the age of 2 when he suffered extreme and violent tempter tantrums, which grew in severity as he got older. His day care provider, who eventually expelled him, reported that he was often “off in his own world.” He once threatened to kill his brother and went rummaging through the kitchen looking for items sharp enough to do the job. The first-grader did not listen well and had been suspended from riding the school bus for throwing things. His mother says she must lock up knives and other sharp objects, and that he had previously pulled a knife on a boy in the neighborhood. The boy’s father was in prison. (Matlock, 2012)
A 5-year-old puts a broken piece of glass to a peer’s throat in the school cafeteria. He fails kindergarten (twice), breaks beds and windows, lies, steals, and has difficulty sleeping or following rules. Counseling records at age 7 reveal he was hospitalized after trying to hang his younger brother, and “has been sexually inappropriate with animals, friends, his younger brother and a little girl from the neighborhood.” He regularly attacks students/teachers and cannot be taken on field trips due to his behavioral issues. (O’Brian, 201 I)
A 9-year-old boy, D.W., gets in trouble for throwing pea gravel at a teacher in one instance, and throwing child-sized chairs at a teacher in another, which the school determines to constitute the “use of weapons.” Other times he’ll pick up a chair and hold it over his head as if to seek the teacher’s attention. In another instance, he comments on how sharp the metal strip in a ruler he has is, and says, “Oh, this can cut someone,” before breaking the metal strip out of the ruler and using it to shave his chair. He throws rocks at the teacher, sometimes in class and sometimes during recess. “The first time he threw a rock, it was probably a quarter size or bigger,” says his teacher. “Like it was a big rock. He missed me though.” (Bd. of Education, 2020)
Case studies of disturbed children
Here are some more extensive case studies on disturbed children:
Case study #I: B.T.B.
A boy described as B.T.B. exhibits classic symptoms of an attachment trauma after being removed form his drug-abusing mother at age 2 1/2. He’s been put on medication, but as his grandmother says, “[t]he medication helps to slow him down but it really doesn’t help him in his behaviors.”
His grandparents attempted to put him in an number of preschools, but he “attacked adults.” So they would call her “to come in to remove him.” When they tried to take him to kindergarten, “an hour later” the school called and “demanded [she] come back and get him.”
In one case he uses his T-shirt to unscrew a hot light bulb before handing the bare bulb to a two-year-old boy, resulting in second degree burns on the boy’s fingers. In another incident, he discretely removed the slats from a new bunk bed his parents had bought, and hid them behind a closet door. As his grandmother describes it: “Okay, it’s time to go to bed. Lights out. His brother jumps in bed, covers up. [B.T.B.] climbs up the ladder, dives onto the bed and the mattress comes down on top of his brother. So in the process of him taking those slats out, because they were a metal, he bent them so they couldn’t go back. So a bunk bed set that he-that I paid for, that was only maybe three months old was trashed. So now I had to buy a whole new bedroom set. So these are the type of things that continue to go on and have to be dealt with.” (Brady, 2018)
Case study # 2: John
Lyons Hardy describes one little boy, “John,” who was removed from his biological mother at age two for “severe neglect and physical abuse.” He was then placed with relatives who also reportedly physically and sexually abused him, before being dumped back into the foster care system. So he had a history of abuse, neglect, and several breaks in attachment – the trifecta of harm.
John exhibited behaviors that mimicked ADHD, bipolar disorder, PTSD, reactive attachment disorder (RAD), and oppositional defiant disorder all at once – an example of why so many kids with attachment disorders are misdiagnosed and guided to improper treatments, which Hardy likens to “throwing water on the flames of a fire rather than at its base.” (Hardy, 2017, p. 33) John “was typically impulsive, intrusive, and argumentative. He vacillated between being oppositional with adults and protecting them from perceived injustices perpetrated by other patients. On some days, he showed affection towards certain adults and expressed pleasure at their presence. On other days, however, he was dismissive or neutral towards the same adults.” (ibid, p. 35) When it came to kids his own age, “he was highly desirous of peer relationships, but he frequently sabotaged them by teasing, provoking, or arguing with the peers, cheating at games, and destroying or stealing peers’ property … .John also had some sexualized behaviors such as touching peers’ genital areas and coming out of the shower in front of peers and staff with no clothes on.”
John “typically did not express regret for his behaviors or respond to the efforts of staff to engage him in discussions about their meaning.” He didn’t respond to incentive systems meant to control his behavior. The facility he was placed in offered a daily tier system that awarded three levels of privileges based on behavior. John never made it past the bottom tier.
As is all too typical in cases like this, John’s difficult behavior provoked less-than-ideal responses from the adults around him, leading to a reciprocal downward spiral. “Working with him aroused counter-transferential feelings of anger, fear, love, sadness, irritation, affection, helplessness, joy, hope, and hatred,” writes Hardy. “One staff member described her experiences with John as being the precipitant in a personal spiritual crisis. Some staff saw him as conniving, mean, and intentionally oppositional. Others viewed him as intelligent, anxious, and severely damaged. Even for the adults who had a more positive view of John, at times his behaviors were so difficult to accept that they responded in a nontherapeutic manner.” (ibid, p. 36)
Case study #3: An 8-year-old foster child
The following story is taken from an incident report log made by CPS workers, describing an episode involving a little girl at a foster care facility:
[Child] was asked to brush her teeth. She brushed her teeth then went to the couch and refused to get up and go to bed. Multiple staff asked her to go to bed. She grunted at staff and refused. Staff … tried to get her to stand up. Child would not stand up. [Staff person] carried her to the hallway and child attempted to spit on [staff person]. [Staff person] set child on the floor due to spitting and wiggling.
Child started spitting on staff. .. Child then took her shirt off. Staff requested she put it back on. She would not put it back on and threw it at staff. Child continued spitting on staff. Child took pants off. Staff request child put pants back on. Child refused and threw pants at staff. Child continued spitting on staff. Child continued to sit in hallway with no clothing for several minutes … [Staff person] called On-Call Supervisor … who advised to keep line of [sight] on the child and ignore behavior. Staff all went to end of hall and kept line of sight…
Child began hitting her head on the wall. Staff asked child to stop, she did not. [Staff person] got a pillow to put behind her head. Child took the pillow and tried to throw it and began hitting elbows on the wall. Child hit head on the wall again. [Another child] was trying to go to sleep in the room next to this and was upset that the child was making the noise … Child then got into [another child’s] bed, still with no clothes on and began spitting on everything and throwing [the other child’s] things off [her] bed. Child did not listen … [Staff] called On-Call Supervisor again who stated to call 911 and have a staff sit with child at the ER.
Child began biting herself on the arms and legs during this phone call. [Staff] called 911 and requested an ambulance to get assistance with the child’s self-harm behavior. . .. Law enforcement arrived, not an ambulance like requested. Law Enforcement observed naked child banging head on the wall and spitting at law enforcement. …. Law enforcement asked child why she didn’t want to go to bed. Child stated she wants her brother, law enforcement asked where he was. Child stated in hospital, CPS put him there. Child started crying. Law enforcement continued to speak to child about going to bed and asked to see her bedroom. Child took them to her room. Child put clothes on, and law enforcement read her a bedtime story and left. (Stukenberg, 2024, @4 72- 73)
Case study #4: Mary
Mary was born to a schizophrenic mother who tried to kill her daughter on 4 separate occasions. When Mary was three, her mother abandoned her by shoving her off onto a stranger. She took Mary for a walk, handed her off, and then left.
“In school Mary was a troublemaker: For years she hit, kicked, and scratched other children,” writes Alice Miller. “She would wring the necks of pigeons, and once she pushed her little cousin from the top of an air-raid shelter onto the concrete eight feet below. The following day she tried to choke three little girls on a playground. At the age of nine she started a new school; two of her teachers there later stated: ‘It’s better not to delve too deeply into her life and circumstances.”
Mary’s story has an ending more tragic than most: Feeling unloved and with her psychological wounds uncorrected, she went on to murder two young boys, becoming the youngest person ever to receive a life sentence at 11-years-old. (Miller, 1983)
More information on disturbed children
To learn more about disturbed children within the foster care system, get our book The Child Snatchers, which discusses the realities of America’s foster care system in depth and the serious harm it does to children.
For more information on working with disturbed children and kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, see our books Vulnerable Children (which covers working with disadvantaged kids and healing their wounds), as well as Difficult Children, which focuses on working with disturbed kids and correcting their behavioral problems.
See also …
References:
Bd. of Education of Mahomet-Seymour Cmty. School District #3 v. S. W. & K. W. (2020, May 1) Fed. Court in the 7th Circuit
Brady v. Comm’r of Social Services, Feb. 21, 2018, Dist. Ct. 6th Cir.
Hardy, L.T. (2007) “Attachment theory and reactive attachment disorder: Theoretical perspectives and treatment implications.” Journal of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, Vol. 20(1):27-34, Feb., p. 38
Miller, A. (1983) For Your Own Good. New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux
O’Brian v. Astrue, 2011, (June 22) Dist. Ct. 5th Cir.
Stukenberg v. Abbott (2024, April 15) 730 F. Supp. 3d 354, U.S. Dist. Court for the Southern District of Texas, Corpus Christi Division