Effectiveness of child-parent relationship therapy on social skills of pre-school children suffering from attention deficiet/hyper activity disorder

The present study aims at the investigation of the effectiveness of child-parent relationship therapy on decreasing the symptoms of the attention-deficit–hyperactivity disorder and enhancing social skills of the children suffering from this illness. The research population consists of all preschool children studying in Ardabil, Iran in 2013 (N = 6000). To conduct this experimental study, 20 children among all pre-school students in Ardabil, who were suffering from attention-deficit–hyperactivity disorder, were selected randomly and using random assignment were divided into two experimental and control groups.The experimental group received 10 sessions (each lasting for two hours) of group therapy of the child-parent relationship based on the Braton and Landreth model. The control group received the routine of their daily spending. The data were collected with preschool children’s attention-deficit-hyperactivity Mohammadi, Mesgarpor, Sahimi and Mohammadi, 2006) and social skills index (Gresham,Elliot,1990) and were analyzed with multivariate analysis of the variance (MANOVA). The results showed that the child-parent relationship group therapy has a significant impact on reducing the symptoms of ADHD; however, it had no effects on the preschool children’s social skills. The findings show that group therapy can be used to decrease ADHD disorder symptoms in a child-parent relationship, but it's not effective to enhance their social skills.