The phrase "a troubled youngster" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a young person who is experiencing difficulties or challenges, often emotional or behavioral in nature.
Example: "The school counselor was concerned about the well-being of a troubled youngster who had been acting out in class."
Alternatives: "a distressed child" or "a struggling youth."
He was a troubled youngster, he said, often skipping school.
Never mind that the main witness, a former girlfriend of Mr. Tyler's, was a troubled youngster who had been under the care of a psychiatrist and had a history of reporting phony crimes to the police, including a false report of a kidnapping.
That slogan, from a $2 million antidrug campaign Baltimore began six months ago, is part exhortation, part call to action, part desperate plea to take back the neighborhoods, to report drug dealers, to seek drug treatment, to become a police officer or a mentor to a troubled youngster.
The Goldfinch focuses on Theo Decker, a troubled youngster struggling with the loss of his mother, dealing with a remote father, and trying to find his way through a duplicitous world.
Meanwhile, Broken (2012, StudioCanal, 15) heralds the arrival of a major talent in the form of Eloise Laurence, who lends real heart and soul to the role of a troubled youngster living in a close that makes Albert Square look positively uneventful.
Shavod Jones, who lived with his grandmother in East Harlem, seemed a classic example of a severely troubled youngster who had slipped through the system, whose problems were recognized but remained unsolved and therefore spiraled.
Troubled youngster in need of a male role model?
Unable to live with his mother and too much for his grandmother to handle, the troubled youngster was placed in a residential treatment center at upstate Hawthorne, N.Y., but ran away.
Her latest, directed by Kip Fagan, concerns two girls — consigned to unsupervised co-dependency by their alcoholic mother — who draw another troubled youngster into their circle until a horrible accident shatters their equilibrium.
AH The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, by Brady Udall (Vintage, £6.99) "When I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head," begins the story of troubled youngster Edgar Mint, growing up on an Apache reservation in Arizona.
It has been a complicated career for Jason Williams, the point guard known to some as "White Chocolate," who has morphed from troubled youngster in Sacramento, to reborn star in Memphis, to key championship cog in Miami to struggling veteran in Orlando.
