Parental Stress and Parental Self-Efficacy as Mediators of the Association Between Children’s ADHD and Marital Satisfaction

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.