Parenting Styles and ADHD Symptoms

 

In my continued effort to beat a dead horse, this post concerns yet another not-so-science-based characteristic of authors of the literature on ADHD: their refusal to consider any alternate interpretations of their data other than that they are studying some sort of brain disease. In this case, they do not consider the possibility that the symptoms of their subjects come as a result of environmental issues, such as a chaotic home environment and/or sleep deprivation.

One well-publicized study (Variable Patterns of Remission From ADHD in the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD | American Journal of Psychiatry (psychiatryonline.org) purports to show that up to 90% of children who have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may continue to experience residual symptoms of the disorder into young adulthood. Amazingly, the authors add that they may also have periods of remission along the way. In other words, ADHD is a disease with waxing and waning symptoms. Could it not be that other, environmental issues that create their symptoms are what is doing the waxing and waning???

In another publication, Greg Mattingly, MD, of the Midwest Research Group, tells us that, “Instead of resorting to positive parenting, many of them [parents of kids diagnosed with ADHD] have fallen back on what we call negative parenting: scolding, discipline, getting frustrated. As we shift into next year, we need to shift into how we shift into a positive parenting model. I want you to talk to your kids with encouragement about the school year. Share something each day that was something cool they learned in a positive way, and then complement them for sharing that fact back with you."

So the symptoms get better with positive changes in parenting style? The author doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that negative parenting styles were perhaps a big cause of the so-called disease in the first place. 

This reminds me of TARA, a support group for parents of people with BPD (at least those that weren’t physically or sexually abusive, since those relatively common parents-of-kids-with-the-disorder would never join a parent support group —other than perhaps the False Memory Syndrome Foundation). They teach parents how not to invalidate their kids but somehow don’t mention the DBT theory that an invalidating environment is a major cause of the disorder in the first place. In TARA's case, this isn’t a bad thing because if they did that, a lot of these parents wouldn’t attend their seminars. But researchers in the field ignores this issue as well.

Borderline Personality Disorder: Children Burdening Parents, Or Parents Burdening Children?

I had a telling experience while trying to get a paper published about how the parents of offspring with borderline personality disorder (BPD) give their adult children a lot of double messages (The instrument I used and the results of the study are described in a previous post). The experience indicated that the peer review process by which other practitioners review an article for scientific merit and accuracy may sometimes be more political than scientific.

At the time, I belonged to, and was the treasurer for, a research group in psychiatry in the field of personality disorders that had editorial control of a journal, the Journal of Personality Disorders (JPD).

For the purposes of gaining more financial support for their organization and its research, this group of researchers had been cultivating very close relationships with two "support groups" for the parents of people diagnosed with BPD - Treatment and Research Advances National Association for Personality Disorders (TARA), and the National Education Alliance Borderline Personality Disorder (NEA-BPD). 

As readers of this blog must know by now, my take is that the disorder is produced and maintained by certain ongoing repetitive dysfunctional interpersonal interactions with patients' families-of-origin members, particularly with primary attachment figures like parents. My paper showed that adults with the disorder reported frequent ongoing double messages from their parents and other attachment figures. The results proved to be highly, highly significant: BPD patients reported significantly more contradictory responses than did both patients with other psychiatric disorders (p=.004) and "normals" (p=.003). And this was with a small sample size that makes the results even more impressive. 

Nonetheless, the JPD turned down it down. Flat out rejected it. That the article had merit was evidenced by the fact that it was subsequently accepted for publication by a mainstream psychiatry journal, Comprehensive Psychiatry, with a broader readership. 

I cannot prove it, of course, but I suspect that the reason the paper was rejected was because the group was cultivating the relationship with the parent support groups and did not want to take any chances on alienating them.

Further evidence for my suspicion took place a short time later, when I was one of the peer reviewers for a paper for the JPD by some other authors. This paper detailed what was said when the authors interviewed the members of the parent support groups about their "burdens" in having to deal with an adult child with the disorder - as if the parents had nothing to do with the child's problems in the first place.

Research has consistently shown that a history of severe physical and/or sexual child abuse is one of the most frequently-seen risk factors for the disorder - although not all such parents of people with BPD had been physically or sexually abusive. A significant minority of them in fact exhibit a rather virulent version of highly over-involved, so called "helicopter" parenting.

Not only are these parents over-involved with their offspring, but they also feel they are burdened by them. And according to this study, by their own admission! This is the source of a borderline-ogenic double message, "I'm obsessed with you, but I feel that you are big burden." If children believe that their parents need their children to be burdensome, then that is what the children will become. Far be it for a child to deprive a parent of a cherished role.

After a while, it becomes difficult to tell who is doing what to whom to cause burdens, because the adult children and the parents feed into one another's dysfunctional behavior simultaneously. I refer to this phenomenon as dialectic causality.

My review of this other paper pointed out that the members of the support group who had been interviewed most likely fell into the over-involved rather than the abusive category of borderline-ogenic parents. After all, parents who had, for example, sexually abused their children were highly unlikely to join a parent support group (except perhaps the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which would support them in their denial). 

Therefore, I recommended that the authors should mention that the sample they interviewed was highly likely to be a somewhat biased sample.

The paper was eventually accepted and published with almost no mention of this irony at all!