amily caregivers can experience significant stress because of the added responsibilities of caring for a family member. Adverse health outcomes for family caregivers are both physical and psychological. Caregiver stress can have adverse effects on the marital relationships of caregivers. Caregiver stress affecting parents in households with an ADHD child can lead to marital strife. Such strife not only damages the marital relationship, it aggravates the child's ADHD condition (Harrist & Ainsley, 1998).
While ADHD is the most prevalent child health issue in the contemporary period in the United States, treatment frequency for ADHD varies substantially across geographic regions, with the proportion of children receiving treatment for ADHD three times higher in the Northeast and Midwest than in the Southwest. Further, the proportion of children receiving ADHD treatment in the Southwest is twice the proportion receiving such treatment in some Western states (LeFever, 2001).
Professional disagreement exists as to the cause of the regional variations in the proportion of children diagnosed with ADHD. On one side of the issue, health care professionals cite a low ratio of ADHD specialists to population. At the other end of the continuum, health care professionals contend that physicians misdiagnose many children as having ADHD when in fact they do not. Some health care professionals believe that ethnic variations across geographic regions in the United States may account for some of the variation in the proportion of children diagnosed with ADHD (LeFever, 2001).
The research focus of the proposed study is the capacity of psychosocial intervention to have a positive impact on the behavior of ADHD diagnosed children in elementary and middle school classrooms. Because the prevalence of ADHD is higher among boys than it is among girls and because African Americans are represented disproportionately among people diagnosed with AD...