BRINGING up a badly behaved child is an expensive task for parents — and for society.

Psychiatrists have calculated that a seriously disruptive child costs parents, the NHS, social services and schools an extra £6,000 a year on average.

First, there are the endless trips to casualty. Then there is the extra tuition and the cost of sending out social workers to check how the family is coping.

But by far the heaviest part of the burden is shouldered by the parents. Repairing damage to the home, taking extra days off work and ensuring that the tearaways are constantly supervised costs £4,637 a year.

The figures were calculated by a team led by Stephen Scott, from the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Their study is published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

While William Brown — the character created in the 1920s Just William stories by Richmal Crompton and immortalised in several BBC series — was only up to mischief, the study focused on children who were more seriously disruptive.

They interviewed the parents of 80 children aged between 3 and 8 who had been referred to mental health services because their behaviour was unmanageable.Three quarters of the children were boys. All were assessed as being in the worst 1 per cent nationally on a recognised scale of antisocial behaviour. This includes being hostile, defiant, aggressive and destructive.

Tendencies can become clear in some children as early as two or three years of age. The researchers said that antisocial behaviour could be treated, but if it is not it could be hard to correct later and lead to problems such as violence, criminality, unstable relationships and mental health problems.

One study has shown that children who still have persistent antisocial behaviour by the age of 10 will cost society ten times as much by the time they are 28 years old as children who behave normally.

Despite this, the authors say, little is spent on what is often seen as a “social problem”, rather than a medical one.

Only about £10 per head per year is spent on child and adolescent mental health, and most of that goes on life-threatening disorders, such as depression, psychosis, self-harm, anorexia and drug abuse.

The team discovered that two fifths of the children in the study had been admitted to hospital in the previous year, for an average of eight days.

This was usually after reckless behaviour led to injuries such as scalds, burns, car accidents or concussion. A further quarter had been taken to casualty in the previous year — most of them more than once — after having accidents.

Two thirds of the parents had made extra use of nursery provision and, even at this age, a third of the children had been seen by an educational psychologist. A fifth had needed intervention by social services.

Parents estimated that they spent an extra eight hours a week on household tasks as a result of their children’s behaviour. Some were forced to take days off work when the child was sent home from school.

A value was set on these extra hours of work. If mothers were unemployed, their hours was assessed at £5.57 (the cost of a child carer). If they worked, the figure used was their hourly rate in employment. The average was £4,526 a year.

The authors said the families were “notably disadvantaged”. A quarter of the children came from single-parent households, 19 per cent from black or minority ethnic groups and more than half from homes where the mother had left school by 16. More than a quarter of household incomes were less than £175 a week.

However, the team said it was almost certainly wrong to blame the environment, saying there was a strong genetic component in antisocial behaviour.

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