The management of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties has always been a source of worry and concern to those who have to deal with them. Many such children are unpredictable, sometimes embarrassing, and can often make us feel helpless. We need to know more about them, and why they think, feel, and behave as they do.

Originally published in 1990, the contributors to this volume bring a wide-ranging professional, practical approach to the problem, looking at it from the perspectives of psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, education, and social work. They underline the fact that such behaviour cannot be assessed in isolation from the context in which it occurs, and go beyond a mere description of maladjusted children to ask, ‘Maladjusted to what? And under what conditions?’ The social and family context is continually borne in mind.

The book will still be of great interest to psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, teachers and social workers, as well as to students in those disciplines, who will find it an invaluable source to help them in their first encounters with child patients, clients and pupils.