Comparing the Effectiveness of Parenting Education Based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Parenting Based on Positive Psychology on Emotion Regulation in Mothers of Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

In recent years, children's behavioral, emotional, psychological, and emotional problems have become the focus of psychologists and psychiatrists. One of the children's behavioral problems is Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Having a child with ADHD in the family can lead to feelings of inability to play a parental role and further challenges in raising a child. Mothers of children with this disorder experience significant pressures and challenges. One of the problems for mothers of children with behavioral disorders is poor management and regulation of their emotions. There are different approaches to parenting. One of these approaches is parenting education based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Another intervention is parenting education based on positive psychology. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of parenting education based on ACT and parenting education based on positive psychology on the emotion regulation in mothers of children with ADHD.

This research is a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest design with a control group. The statistical population consists of all mothers of male children with ADHD aged 8 to 12 years living in Tehran City, Iran, in 2021. Using a purposive and convenience sampling method, among 100 mothers with ADHD children (diagnosed by a psychiatrist), after a pretest, 45 eligible mothers who met the inclusion criteria were recruited. As the final sample, the mothers were randomly assigned to two experimental and one control group(s) (each group with 15 people). The inclusion criteria were as follows: having sufficient literacy to learn and complete the questionnaire, achieving a score lower than the cut–off point of 36 on the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) (Gratz and Roemer, 2004) in the pretest by mothers, providing a written commitment to attend the course regularly and to be committed to doing homework, presenting a diagnosis of ADHD by a psychiatrist and clinical psychologist for children, lacking severe psychological disorders (anxiety, depression, obsessive–compulsive disorder) in the mothers. The exclusion criteria included a lack of commitment to do homework and dissatisfaction with continued cooperation. Acceptance and commitment–based parenting education and positive psychology–based parenting education were provided for the experimental groups in ten 90–min sessions for three months, using the ACT–based parenting education training package (Coyne & Murrell, 2009) and a parenting education therapy package based on positive psychology (Rashid & Seligman, 2013), respectively. The control group waited for training during this period and did not receive any intervention. The measurement tool of the present study was DERS. To analyze the collected data, in addition to using descriptive indicators (mean and standard deviation), inferential statistics methods (analysis of variance, univariate analysis of covariance, and Bonferroni post hoc test) were used. Data analyses were performed in SPSS software version 22, and the significance level of all tests was considered 0.05.

The results showed that after removing the pretest effect, there was a significant difference between the experimental groups and the control group in the mean score of emotion regulation in the posttest (p<0.001). In other words, parenting education based on acceptance and commitment and parenting education based on positive psychology reduced the difficulty in regulating emotion in the experimental groups compared to the control group. Eta squared value was 0.502. Also, parenting intervention based on acceptance and commitment (p<0.001) and parenting intervention based on positive psychology (p=0.023) for the experimental groups reduced the difficulty of emotional regulation in mothers compared to the control group. Finally, there was a significant difference between the effectiveness of parenting education based on ACT and parenting education based on positive psychology on reducing emotion regulation in mothers of children with ADHD (p<0.001).

Based on the present study's findings, both parenting education interventions based on ACT and parenting education based on positive psychology are effective in emotion regulation in mothers of children with ADHD. However, the effectiveness of parenting based on positive psychology on mothers' emotion regulation is more than parenting education based on ACT.