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Addressing Childhood and Adolescent Behavioral Problems: Diagnosis Criteria and the Role of the School Psychologist Introduction This paper shall examine the field of child psychology in respect to the topic of conduct disorder (CD). In child psychology, conduct disorder is an extremely difficult subject to accurately address and clarify, due primarily to the need to distinguish between normal childhood behaviors and the onset or development of an actual disorder. Once a child matures to the stage where he or she is allowed into the school system, however, it becomes pressing to identify and clarify the presence of CD in order to better assess the behaviors of that child. This paper shall investigate the issues and the psychological development of conduct disorder in both the childhood and the adolescent years. The diagnosis of conduct disorder shall be compared and contrasted against oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and the correlation that conduct disorder has with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Standard medical definitions for these disorders, as well as the growing body of literature on this field, shall be included to better round out the discussion and to signify the impact of such disorder