Impaired Interparental Relationships in Families of Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Abstract

Abstract. Research on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adolescents has traditionally focused on the genetic and neurobiological aspects of the disorder, but the role of family relationships has been much less systematically examined. There is growing evidence that the quality of interparental relationships and a child’s ADHD symptoms are reciprocally related. Because the literature appears to be inconsistent, this meta-analysis aims to summarize previous research and assess whether there are robust differences in the quality of interparental relationships between parents of children with ADHD and parents of healthy children. This meta-analysis of 15 studies with 43 effect sizes revealed a small but significant difference ( d = .24), which indicates that parents of a child with ADHD report poorer relationship quality than parents of healthy children. This effect was moderated by the child’s age and did not depend on whether the child had a comorbid oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) or conduct disorder (CD). The causality of this relationship has yet to be determined.

Parents’ Voice: Parents’ Emotional and Practical Coping with a Child with Special Needs

“…When one of the children has attention deficit disorder, parents experience more stress and have more conflicts with their children, compared to parents with children without ADHD. In addition, the parents' relationships are influenced by the child behavior (Weyers et al, 2019).…”

Intelligent Recognition of Hospital Image Based on Deep Learning: The Relationship between Adaptive Behavior and Family Function in Children with ADHD

“…Contrary to previous studies, only considering the types of inattention can completely alleviate this relationship by externalizing behavior problems. It is better to analyze it in the longitudinal study, but it lacks the content of numerical analysis [ 3 ]. Franke s said the study assessed possible correlations between behavioral profiles, quality of life and perceptions of social support, and parenting styles adopted by 26 mothers of children and adolescents with ADHD diagnosed by the same neurologist.…”

Parental self-efficacy and satisfaction with parenting as mediators of the association between children’s noncompliance and marital satisfaction

“…Fewer studies have examined the opposite direction of influence, in which children's behavioral problems increase parent-child conflicts and stress, which spills over into the marital relationship, creating negativity and marital dissatisfaction. The few studies that did focus on this direction found spillover effects among children diagnosed with behavioral disorders (Ben-Naim et al, 2019;Lin et al, 2017;Weyers et al, 2019), autism spectrum disorder (Sim et al, 2017), and developmental delays (Robinson & Neece, 2015). Our results add to the existing literature in two respects: First, by supporting the existence of a spillover process from the parent-child subsystem to the marital subsystem, which is a less researched direction of influence, and second, by focusing on a population that is not commonly studied and demonstrating this effect among non-referred, typically developing preschool children who exhibit mild behavioral problems at a nonclinical level.…”

“…Second, considerable research regarding the association between children's behavioral problems and marital satisfaction has focused on parents of children diagnosed with behavioral disorders, developmental delays, or autism spectrum disorder (e.g., Robinson & Neece, 2015;Sim et al, 2017;Weyers et al, 2019). In the present study, we sought to add to the existing body of knowledge by focusing on a non-clinical sample of typically developing children, and examining the association between their mild behavioral problems and parents' marital satisfaction.…”