Parental ADHD: Relations to Parenting, Child Behavior, and Treatment Outcomes

As editors, we are pleased to introduce this set of seven papers that form a special section devoted to the study of parental attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The idea for this section grew out of discussions of the work being conducted in our own labs and others focused broadly on families of children with ADHD. Research in this area traces a developmental trajectory from early studies that examined cross-sectional relations between parenting and child ADHD, to research that distinguished between child ADHD versus child oppositional/conduct problems and that examined common parental psychopathologies such as depression and antisocial behavior, allowing us to isolate relations between these factors and parenting quality. As the heritability of ADHD became firmly established and the lifespan nature of the disorder was increasingly recognized, the most recent arc of this research trajectory reflects studies that place ADHD symptoms in the parent in a central role. Moreover, recent longitudinal research has begun to shed light on the impact of parental ADHD (alone or in combination with other factors) on the trajectory of child functioning over time, in line with the developmental psychopathology framework and our model of ADHD in families (Johnston and Chronis-Tuscano 2015). This special section was conceived as a way to bring together a compilation of these newer studies of parental ADHD to highlight similarities as well as differences in the emerging findings, to refine the models linking parental and child ADHD, and to spur further empirical tests of such models and to ultimately inform interventions to enhance child functioning. …