Document Type : Original Article
Researchers
1 PHD student
2 Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
3 Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
Ministerial Ethics Committee
This study examines Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children and the role of parents in managing and reducing its symptoms. ADHD is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in childhood, often leading to academic, social, and familial difficulties. Parents play a critical role in the development and persistence of children's behaviors, and maladaptive parenting styles can exacerbate the condition. The Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) approach, as a novel intervention, focuses on enhancing parents' reflective capacity to help them better understand their child’s internal states and establish more effective and empathetic interactions. Such interactions can strengthen executive functions, emotional self-regulation, and socio-emotional competencies in children with ADHD—skills that are essential for academic success, social relationships, and daily functioning. The aim of this research is to design, validate, and assess the effectiveness of a parenting training package based on mentalization to improve the quality of life for children with ADHD and their families. In this study, the parenting package was developed through a qualitative inductive content analysis method, and its effectiveness is evaluated using a quantitative statistical method (MANCOVA), through standardized questionnaires: the Executive Function Home Environment Scale (2018), the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Hofmann & Kashdan, 2010), and the Socio-Emotional Competence Scale (Zhou & Ji, 2012).