Comparison of the Effectiveness of Brain Gym and Child-Parent Relationship Therapy on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as one of the most ‎prevalent childhood disorders, which can have negative impacts on all aspects ‎of personal life, has always been a hotspot for mental health professionals. ‎Because of complications and negative consequences of this disorder, which ‎include aggression, object-manipulation, high-risk behaviors, poor school ‎performance, and academic failure, psychologists, psychotherapists, and ‎educational experts have tried to address and treat this disorder by various ‎methods. These children hardly can sit around; instead, they are fidgety and ‎continuously in motion, and especially in a classroom setting, which requires sitting ‎quietly for an extended period paying attention to classroom topics, they are in ‎serious trouble. In the long run, they are exposed to continuous misconception ‎and abuse, especially in their house by their parent. So, improvements in ‎the parent-child relationship can decrease interpersonal issues, which, in turn, ‎results into a correction in parents’ characters/behavior style regarding their ‎children, while improving problematic behaviors of these children too. Current ‎research, therefore, targeted the effectiveness of Brain Gym and Child-parent ‎Relationship therapy programs on the symptoms of this disorder.‎ This research was a control group pretest-posttest ‎design, a type of quasi-experimental research design. The statistical population ‎included all the children who have ADHD who attended consultation ‎centers in the city of Gorgan. Of those qualified children aged 7-10, which had ‎no other physical or mental disorder, having at least one literate parent ‎voluntarily participating in the research, we selected 30 children, with their ‎parents, randomly clustered into 3 groups; 10 children in Brain Gym group, 10 ‎children in Child-parent Relationship therapy group, and 10 children in the ‎control group. Before the intervention, we pretested these groups using the ‎Conners’ Parent’s Questionnaire. Then, the Brain Gym test group participated in ‎an educational program consisting of 8 sixty-minute sessions comprising 26 ‎Brain Gyms. In the Child-parent Relationship therapy ‎group, parents ‎participated in 10 ninety-minute sessions of Child-parent Relationship therapy ‎in which they took assignments, their performances evaluated, and proper ‎feedback and recovery training given to them; no training program ‎implemented in the control group. After finishing the therapy methods, the three ‎groups underwent the posttest, and after two months, all these groups were ‎followed up to evaluate the sustainability of the therapeutic effects. For the sake of ‎follow-up, and to deduce and understand the association of descriptive ‎statistics variables, including frequency, percentage frequency, mean, standard ‎deviation, standard error, we utilized repeated measures design — the analysis ‎performed by SPSS software (version 24).‎ The results suggest that both therapy methods were effective in ‎decreasing ADHD symptoms (p<0.001), however, the significance of Brain Gym ‎results were higher than that of Child-parent Relationship therapy (p<0.001). ‎These findings indicate that those methods meaningfully decreased the ‎symptoms of ADHD children comparing to the control group. Additionally, the ‎results suggest that the significant difference between the test group and the ‎control group, about ADHD symptoms of these students, were ‎sustainable after two months of follow-up.‎ Based on the results of this research, Brain Gym and Child-parent ‎Relationship therapy training program can improve ADHD symptoms, so we ‎suggest that to enhance ADHD children’s condition, such training methods to be ‎implemented in various educational/therapy centers as well as in the house by ‎their parents, as a complementary therapy for these children. We suggest that ‎tailored, coherent training programs be made for parents and teachers to handle these children strategically; we also recommend that, during training ‎sessions, the fathers’ potentials to be utilized more than before, while studying ‎more about the effectiveness of their role.‎