The goal of this chapter is to render an environmental explanation of the timing and severity of child and adolescent antisocial behavior that can be reorganized into 3 basic hypotheses: (1) the social interactional hypothesis: Antisocial behavior has a function within the individual’s immediate social environment; (2) the marginal deviation hypothesis: characteristics of the child can qualify the nature and saliency of social interactional processes; (3) the contextual sensitivity hypothesis: contexts largely define the form and function of antisocial behavior in relationships and potentially amplify characteristcis of the individual that interplay with social interactinal processes.