Challenging behavior exhibited by young children is becoming recognized as a serious impediment to social–emotional development and a harbinger of severe maladjustment in school and adult life. Consequently, professionals and advocates from many disciplines have been seeking to define, elaborate, and improve on existing knowledge related to the prevention and resolution of young children's challenging behaviors. Of particular concern for the field of behavioral disorders is the lack of correspondence between what is known about effective practices and what practices young children with challenging behavior typically receive. To increase the likelihood that children receive the best of evidence-based practices, the current analysis was conducted to provide a concise synthesis and summary of the principal evidence pertaining to the presence and impact, prevention, and intervention of challenging behaviors in young children. A consensus building process involving review and synthesis was used to produce brief summary statements encapsulating core conclusions from the existing evidence. This article presents these statements along with descriptions of the strength of the supporting evidence. The discussion addresses directions and priorities for practice and future research.

My review of Filla, Wolery, and Anthony's lead article occurred in an interesting professional context. Simultaneously, I was working in several school district preschool classrooms where staff were struggling, at a philosophical and procedural level, with modifications to their "typical" curricular and instructional practices in order to accommodate learners with autism. Not coincidentally, I also was involved in a state department of education initiative to influence institutions of higher education to beef up their early childhood special education intervention course work, prompted by a general consensus that graduates seemed to know little about effective instructional practices.Realizing full well the dangers in generalizing from an N of 3, let me submit that the baseline performance of the teachers in the Filla et al. (1998) study may, in fact, reflect a more pervasive problem with professional practices and the key issue that is common to my contemporary challenges with individual classroom practices and systemic concerns with teacher preparation programs. Although the prompt-based intervention data offered by Filla and colleagues are compelling in their magnitude and immediacy, it is their baseline and initial, weak intervention phase data that may be even more enlightening to our field.For the baseline condition, the essential absence of teacher prompting for verbal behavior is alarming, especially given the many days in this condition in which the children

In recent years the social problems of youth have been described in term6 of delinquency and alienation. Social intervention programs with youth, however, have tended to focus only on the overt dlsruptive behavior of delinquency. These programs have been disappointingly unsuccemful, perhaps because of their overly narrow conceptual orientation. This aper reviews some (Jf the major theories of delinquency from an e c o l o g d perspective, and relates them to an ecological view of alienation. The reault i s a preliminary sketch of an ecological theory of social satisfaction. It is proposed that common mechanisms underlie alienation and delinquenc a 3 negative socialization outcomes as well as penetration, integration, anBachieved success t u positive socialization outcomes. Some implications of this idea for understanding the behavior of youth are discussed.

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