Assistant Professor of Psychology Tara McKee has published an article titled "The Relation Between Parental Coping Styles and Parent-Child Interactions Before and After Treatment for Children with ADHD and Oppositional Behavior." The article appears in the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Volume 33, No.1.
McKee and her colleagues from the University of Massachusetts, Eastern Connecticut State University and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine sought to investigate the relationship between the coping styles of parents of ADHD children and their response to behavioral parent training programs that teach techniques for managing inappropriate behavior. Prior research has shown that parents with maladaptive coping styles, such as avoidant-focused coping, are more likely to exercise both overly lax and overly harsh punishment in response to their children's oppositional behavior. The researchers hypothesized that this sort of difference would continue to exist after parents had gone through a behavioral parent training program. McKee and her colleagues found that this hypothesis held for fathers, but not for mothers, whose coping styles tended to be unrelated to their level of discipline after the training program.
McKee gave a talk at Bucknell University on Feb. 20 about this study as well as the research she is conducting with her students at Hamilton.
