The phrase "a troubled boy" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a boy who is experiencing emotional or psychological difficulties.
Example: "The story revolves around a troubled boy who struggles to find his place in the world."
Alternatives: "a distressed boy" or "a troubled youth."
Michael was a troubled boy.
Khadr might have had a better chance if he'd been a troubled boy from a "nice" family.
The story features a troubled boy whose mother, a poet, produces work that is "scrupulous, concise, and invested with the comedy inherent in distance".
Later Anne meets "Ranger", a quasi-feudal figure, and "Peter Parker", a troubled boy for whom Anne develops a deep affection despite his destructive tendencies.
THIS IS ENGLAND A drama by Shane Meadows, about a troubled boy in nineteen-eighties England who is befriended by skinheads.
The Tryst had an equally disjointed narrative - about the relationships between a psychiatrist and a troubled boy, and the boy and an old man - but a wonderful atmosphere.
Alone, she spends a little time thinking about her son — "He'd been a very troubled boy, a very misunderstood boy" — and then this startling sentence appears: "After some time, she got up and packed a duffel bag for Africa, exactly as she had done that time before".
A tale of love, loss, and maths, it centres on Nathan (Asa Butterfield), an emotionally troubled boy with a gift for numbers; Spall plays Martin, a sardonic, marijuana-smoking tutor, who is preparing his prodigious teenage pupil for an international Olympiad.
Brinkman's first novel examines grief through the eyes of a mentally troubled boy.
He recalls severe teachers and nice teachers; fights and quarrels and slights and crushes; and old friends, in particular a brilliant, troubled boy who committed suicide.
As a bright but emotionally troubled boy with whom Garland bonds, Bruce Ritchey astonishingly and terrifyingly conveys the inexpressible pain of his remoteness, and Cassavetes keeps his camera uncomfortably close to the boy as well as to his teacher, whose overheated methods are at the core of the drama.
