A Developmental Model of the Propensity to Offend during Childhood and Adolescence *

The goal of our psychological model of juvenile offending (Lahey & Waldman, 2003) is to provide a set of testable causal hypotheses that attempt to explain the development of delinquency and related mental health problems. Our causal model is developmental in two ways. First, it describes causal processes that begin in early childhood and continue at least through adolescence. Second, our model highlights the importance of distinguishing among differing developmental trajectories of child and adolescent offending for the purpose of identifying causal influences on offending.