ABSTRACT
Children with emotional and behavioral disorders (ED/BD) experience difficulties that interfere with their learning and social development and affect their ability to develop positive relationships with adults and peers. They constitute a largely diverse group of children whose difficulties vary in intensity, duration, and frequency, and yet they all constitute an educational, interpersonal, and disciplinary challenge for teachers and parents (NASP, 2005). Consequently, there are a number of conditions that have to be met in order to diagnose children with ED/BD. The official definition of severe emotional disturbance has been laid out by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act 2004 (IDEIA 2004), which established a set of defining criteria or conditions that have to be met in order to categorize a child with an ED/BD.
