Page 37 - Age of onset of disruptive behavior of residentially treated adolescents -Sjoukje de Boer

untraceable or unusable data were about half as high. There may be several reasons
why files were missing or incomplete. Parents may have refused to cooperate with the
youth health care examination, or files can be untraceable because of frequent 2 rehousing of the family or the child. It was unclear what happened to a file if a child
was not at school, for instance in case of institutionalization. Although the exact
reasons for untraceability of the files remained unknown, it should be considered as a
first indication that the early lives of the children that would be institutionalized during adolescence were more turbulent and complicated than those of the controls.
Because the remarks of the teachers were only registered when he or she thought the child needed extra attention, the fact that majority of the inpatient group had a remark of any kind, compared to about only one third of the control group, is an indication that the inpatients already differed from their peers at a very young age. The fact that special attention had been asked for some children, but the remarks in the YHC file were positive or neutral, indicates that the files probably did not always adequately reflect the reason for extra attention.
For the inpatient group, both teachers and health care professionals have reported much more disruptive behavior. This indicates that, based on the observations at the age of five and the fact that the inpatients displayed severe disruptive behavior in adolescence, at least about half of the inpatients probably belonged to the LCP group. Only a minority (7%) of the control group displayed disruptive behavior at age five, and because the controls were selected on their absence of behavioral problems in adolescence, the problems mentioned at the age of five were probably temporarily. The data do not allow conclusions regarding children who did not display disruptive behavior in the second grade. Although the literature is inconclusive about the upper limit in the age of onset of LCP disruptive behavior (e.g., age 8, age 10, age 12), the possibility exists that the group that showed no signs of disruptive behavior at the second grade, did develop this behavior later on during primary school.
It is concluded that within the group that would eventually be treated in the orthopsychiatric residential setting, signs of disruptive behavior were already observed at the age of five by teachers or health care professionals for about half of the respondents. In this aspect, they differed significantly from the control group. More
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