Parents of children with ADHD often experience low marital satisfaction, since the child's increased susceptibility to maladjustment can affect family dynamics as a whole.
Objectives: To explore this association by examining parental stress and parental self-efficacy as two possible mediators.
Method: Totally, 182 Israeli parents of children in the first to ninth grades (63 parents of children with ADHD and 119 without) completed parental self-efficacy, marital satisfaction, and parental stress questionnaires.
Results: As expected, parents of children with ADHD reported higher parental stress, and lower self-efficacy and marital satisfaction than non-ADHD parents. The association between ADHD parents and marital satisfaction was fully explained by parental stress and self-efficacy, suggesting that personal characteristics and situation appraisal are tapped when facing strain and hardship.
Conclusion: These findings provide a window of hope for an otherwise deterministic view of the ADHD-marital dissolution relationship and propose individual and familial interventions that may minimize these damaging effects.
Keywords: ADHD; marital satisfaction; parental self-efficacy; parental stress.