The need to develop more objective, precise means of delineating and defining behavioral abnormality is the focus of this report.

In an endeavor to explore the spectrum of child behavior, the authors undertook a pilot study. Methods and tentative findings are considered.

**Table 2**: The Prevalence of Some Behavior Characteristics in a Weighted Representative Sample of 482 Children Aged 6–12 as Reported by Mothers.
Behavior	Per cent
Fears and worries, 7 or more present	43
Bed wetting within the past year: All frequencies	17
Bed wetting within the past year: Once a month or more	8
Nightmares	28
Food intake: Less than “normal”	20
Food intake: More than “normal”	16
Temper loss: Once a month or more	80
Temper loss: Twice a week or more	48
Temper loss: Once a day or more	11
Over-activity	49
Restlessness	30
Stuttering	4
Unusual movements, twitching or jerking (tics)	12
Biting nails: All intensities	27
Biting nails: Nails bitten down (more severe)	17
Grinding teeth	14
Sucking thumb or fingers: All frequencies	10
ing thumb or fingers: “Almost all the time”	2
Biting, sucking or chewing clothing or other objects	16
Picking nose	26
Picking sores	16
Chewing or sucking lips or tongue or biting inside of mouth	11

…Regarding the differences in distribution among the various subgroups of children in our sample (Tables 5 & 6), it was found that the 6–8-year-old group differs statistically-significantly from children aged 9 to 12 in the higher occurrence of nightmares, frequent temper loss, grinding teeth, and nose picking. statistically-significant differences appear also between the sexes in some areas. More boys are overactive and pick their noses, while a higher proportion of girls seem to have a larger number of fears and worries than boys. Differences by socioeconomic level have not been found to be statistically-significant, although there is some tendency for more fears and worries and more nightmares to be reported for children in the two lower economic quartiles…

The behaviors which children report more often than mothers seem to fall into two distinct groups, the more objective or more easily observable and the more subjective or poorly-defined. The more objective behaviors reported more frequently by the child are tics, stuttering, picking sores, picking nose, and grinding teeth. It is quite possible that many children did not understand what was meant by the questions relating to tics and stuttering and therefore reported adventitious movements such as restless motions or speech difficulties of a different character. Excess affirmative answers by children on other “objective” items: picking sores, picking nose, and grinding teeth might be partly accounted for by the fact that these occurred in mild form and the child, in an effort to be honest, reported occasional practices of which the mother was unaware.