Child: care, health and development
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Child Care Health Dev · Jan 2015
ReviewBeyond symptom control for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): what can parents do to improve outcomes?
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and its associated behavioural manifestations develop and progress as the result of complex gene-environment interactions. Parents exert a substantial influence and play a major role in their child's social environment. Despite this, recent evidence has suggested that adapting the child's environment via parenting interventions has minimal effects on child ADHD symptoms when analysing data from informants who are probably blind to treatment allocation. ⋯ Parenting interventions can have therapeutic benefits for parents as well as children, which is important as parent and child well-being is likely to have a transactional relationship. Evaluation of the clinical success of parenting interventions should focus on a wider range of outcomes in order to aid understanding of the multifaceted benefits that they may be able to offer. Parenting interventions should not be seen as a redundant adjunct to medication in multi-modal treatment approaches for ADHD; they have the potential to target outcomes that, at present, medication seems less able to improve.