With emotional disturbance

Children and youth with emotional disturbance are a heterogeneous group. Although many display similar behavior patterns, such as ranger toward teachers and other adult authority figures or apathetic withdrawal from school situations, the function of the behavior and the reasons for its existence vary widely among individual students. For one child, an aggressive display of anger may be an attempt to increase status with peers, whereas for another, the same behavior may serve to test the limits of the adults' apparent caring responses. Additionally, the behavior of troubled children is characterizes by inconsistency and unpredictability, which are often responses to their chaotic environments. Discussion of characteristics is a difficult task because generalization may lead to oversimplification of the complex problems accompanying emotional disturbance.

As in other categories of exceptionality, the severity-extent of variance from "normal" children's behavior patterns - is an essential factor when we consider characteristics of students with emotional disturbance. Definitions of normality in the realm of social – emotional behavior are more a matter of convention, agreements arrived at between groups of people, that of physical reality such as height or weight. Furthermore, normal emotional development does not imply the absence of problematic behavior. Statistical data from the Berkeley Guidance Study, for example, showed that a large percentage of the normal children studied averaged five or six problems. When considering the characteristics of children who are disturbed, therefore, we might apply criteria developed by Bower that the problems presented be both acute and chronic.

A primary criterion for defining and identifying children with emotional disturbance is a deficit in knowledge and skill acquisition that cannot be attributed to intellectual, sensory, or health factors. Emotionally disturbed children are usually underachievers. Even they may be prevented them from doing well on standardized tests of any kind. Actual academic performance in the classroom generally demonstrates underachievement as a major characteristic. As a general rule, these students have repeatedly failed to be successful in school situation. Whether this failure can be attributed to the interference or problematic behavior or whether the behavior problems are activated by difficulty in learning can become a pointless argument. Both factors are probably in operation, perhaps separately in individual children at first and then simultaneously as a sort of interaction effect, building in severity over time.This kind of overlap of academic underachievement and socialemotional problem behavior may present difficulty for the professional in discriminating between students with mild or moderate learning disabilities and students with emotional disturbance because many individuals in both groups have the two characteristics in common. Again, the most salient features of emotional disturbance are the degree and frequency to which maladaptive behavior is present, but these are not the only features of their exceptionality.

Children with disturbance are also often deficient in expressive oral language ability. Student with disturbance have been found to have structural language patterns typical of much younger children, such as high usage of sentence fragments and a low occurrence of structures indicating language complexity and facility. We might hypothesize that verbal language as a tool for coping with the environment is frequently by-passed by troubled children who have learned instead to act out negative, hostile feelings or to withdraw entirely from human interaction, both physically and verbally. Children with severe disturbance are characterized by a nearly complete lack of functional expressive language.

Children with emotional disturbance have great difficulty building satisfactory interpersonal relationships and they may often seem depressed or have an inordinately large number of tears, pains, or other physical symptoms related to school situations.

The definition of students with emotional disturbance has frequently been called an "educators definition" and is intended to help teachers identify such children.