Word.ws English Dictionary

problem children

problem children is the plural of problem child.

Meaning of problem child

Noun

problem child (plural problem children)

  1. (euphemistic) A child who is particularly difficult to raise or educate, especially due to a lack of self-control and disruptive and antisocial behavior.
    • Of recent times very much has been said regarding the problem child, but as Lady Stradbroke pointed out last week but little is being done to cope with the menace that child is to itself and to the community.1926 March 30, “General Topic: The Problem Child”, in The Age, Australia, retrieved 11 Jun 2009
  2. (broadly, idiomatic) Someone or something persistently difficult or vexing; a frequent source of trouble or annoyance.
    • [A]n ambitious supersonic carrier fighter called the F3H Demon . . . proved too heavy for its Navy-specified Westinghouse engine (in itself a problem child), and turned into a $265 million fiasco.1959 January 26, “Payoff for Pioneers”, in Time
    Antonyms:
    problem-solver

Questions about problem children

What is problem children the plural of?
Problem children is the plural of problem child.

Words near problem children in the dictionary

  1. problackness
  2. problem
  3. problem bear
  4. problem bears
  5. problem child
  6. problem children
  7. problem gambling
  8. problem glasses
  9. problem of Apollonius
  10. problem of evil
  11. problem of universals

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: problem children (page history and authors); problem child (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “problem children.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/problem_children. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.