The Parental Friendship Coaching Program improves peer relationships in children with ADHD

The results of a recent study led by Dr. Sébastien Normand, Associate Professor and Clinical Psychologist in the Department of Psychoeducation and Psychology at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO), highlight the effectiveness of the Parental Friendship Coaching (PFC) program in helping children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) develop friendship skills.

"Children with ADHD often tend to underestimate their social difficulties, which frequently persist throughout their development. Unfortunately, the treatments typically available (e.g., medication, behavioral interventions, and social skills training programs) are ineffective at improving the social relationships of children with ADHD," explains Professor Normand.

"The PFC program is an innovative intervention delivered in group format to parents (with no direct intervention with the children) who want to teach their school-aged child strategies to make and keep good friends. The PFC program is based on the principle that parents are especially well-positioned to facilitate their child’s friendships. In fact, parent involvement in playdates not only helps overcome the resistance some children with ADHD have toward their social difficulties, but also promotes the generalization of learned skills," he adds.

In a randomized controlled trial, Professor Normand and his team offered the PFC program (or a control group) to 134 parents of children with ADHD in the Gatineau-Ottawa and Vancouver regions. The researchers observed the children’s peer interactions in a laboratory setting before, immediately after, and eight months after the program.

"The results show that the PFC program appears effective in reducing friendship-related behavioral problems up to eight months after the program. The PFC program seems particularly effective in improving friendships for children with ADHD who also exhibit behavioral problems, who have a stable friend, or who have a best friend," notes the study’s lead researcher. Combining the results of their other studies, he concludes: "Parents can effectively help their children with ADHD become good friends thanks to the PFC program."

The PFC program has recently received praise from several international leaders in the field of ADHD, including Professor Russell A. Barkley, one of the most respected and cited researchers in the field with 114,054 citations:

"The authors have crafted what I consider to be the best program currently available for working with children with ADHD and their parents on improving the children’s peer relationships that are impaired in the majority of such children. Why? Other social skills programs that predate this one were not designed expressly for the social difficulties evident in children with ADHD. This one was, given that it is based on all that research has taught us about what is going wrong in those peer relationships. The others were based on children with other conditions, usually social anxiety, whereas this one is directly focused on ADHD. The other programs are based on a faulty premise - that children with ADHD are ignorant of social skills and, because they don’t know them, must be trained in them. This program gets it right — ADHD creates more of a problem with using the knowledge and skills a child has in everyday social relationships, and not regarding ignorance of knowledge. Furthermore, other programs train children in artificial circumstances, such as clinics, usually involving other children the child does not normally encounter in their daily life — so they don’t generalize much if at all to natural social settings, if they work at all. For all these and other reasons there is no better source than this one for working with families of children with ADHD. Every discipline interested in doing so will benefit greatly from making this program available." 

— Russell A. Barkley, PhD, clinical professor of psychiatry, School of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University; editor, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment (4th ed.)

Sébastien Normand (Université du Québec en Outaouais/Montfort Hospital), lead author of the study, along with Maude Lambert (Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario), Roger Bakeman (Georgia State University), Joanna Guiet (Université du Québec en Outaouais), Mara Brendgen (Université du Québec à Montréal/CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center), and Amori Yee Mikami (University of British Columbia), published the article Targeting Peer Contagion Dynamics in Children with ADHD: Effects from a Two-Site Randomized Controlled Trial in the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2024.2335633). This study was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) (grants MOP-125897 and 2019-SE3-259636).

More information about the Parental Friendship Coaching program : https://www.routledge.com/Parents-as-Friendship-Coaches-for-Children-with-ADHD-A-Clinical-Guide/Mikami-Normand/p/book/9781032118284

More information about Professor Sébastien Normand’s research : https://www.gns-uqo.com/prisme

Lab website (PRISME) : https://prisme.uqo.ca