Time Spent With Children and Working Parents’ Willingness to Medicate ADHD-Like Behaviors

How much time parents spend with their children is likely toinfluence their judgments of children’s behaviors and the behaviors themselves. In thediagnosis of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), parents arekey informants and decide whether their children should receive medication. Thisexploratory study investigates the relationship between working parents’ willingness tomedicate ADHD-like behaviors and the time they can spend with their children during aregular workday. The participants (409 parents of 5- to 17- year-old children reportinghaving no child with emotional or behavioral problems and 87 reporting having such achild) were drawn from a population-based telephone survey of parents stratified by raceand ethnicity in two urban Florida counties. Path analysis models, controlling forselected sociodemographic and household variables, showed that spending more time withone’s children during a regular workday and self-identifying as African American werenegatively related to willingness to medicate among parents of children with problems.Among parents reporting no children with problems, only the number of children in thehousehold and the parent-type household showed relationships to willingness to medicate,while mothers were more likely than fathers to spend more time with children. Theseobserved relationships were of moderate effect but underscore the importance to initiatestudies using valid measures of quantity and quality of parental time spent with ADHDchildren, and to query parents on these points when assessing the information theyprovide to clinicians