This study looked at 84 mothers and their children aged 5 to 10. Of the children, 44 met criteria for ADHD based on parent report alone. The other 40 did not have ADHD or related behavior problems. Families came from the greater Washington, D.C. area, and only mothers were studied.
Researchers watched how mothers guided and supported their child during a lab task. This is called scaffolding. They also tested the mothers' own thinking skills. Mothers with better working memory showed more scaffolding. So did mothers who were better at switching between tasks. Both links held after accounting for the child's age and the mother's education, and both were unlikely to be down to chance. A mother's rating of her own thinking skills did not predict scaffolding.
The child's ADHD symptoms did not predict scaffolding once these other factors were counted. Mother skills and child symptoms did not combine to matter either. When all four thinking measures were tested together, none stood out.
The study was a snapshot in time, so it cannot show what causes what. The groups differed in child age, gender and mother education. Families had fairly high income and education. Scaffolding scores fell in a narrow range. Some test data were missing and were filled in by estimate. The thinking measures explained only a small share of scaffolding, with working memory adding 7%.
The numbers Stats and what the terms mean
The statistics behind the plain-language claims above.
- Mazursky-Horowitz, 2017: mothers' working memory (Digit Span) predicting scaffolding, beta = 0.24, SE = 0.10, p = 0.02.
- Mazursky-Horowitz, 2017: mothers' task switching (Hotel Test time deviation) predicting scaffolding, beta = -0.21, SE = 0.10, p = 0.04.
- Mazursky-Horowitz, 2017: extra share of scaffolding explained by task switching, an additional 5% of variance.
- Mazursky-Horowitz, 2017: child ADHD symptoms predicting scaffolding in the working memory model, beta = -0.18, SE = 0.01, p = 0.10.
- Mazursky-Horowitz, 2017: mother skill and child symptom combinations, p values 0.15 to 0.79. What the terms mean:
- beta shows how strongly one thing tracks another after other factors are counted. A minus sign shows the direction of the link, not its size.
- SE (standard error) shows how precise the estimate is. Smaller means more precise.
- p is the chance of seeing a result this strong if there were no real link. Below 0.05 is usually treated as unlikely to be down to chance.
Source: Mazursky-Horowitz H, Thomas S, Woods K, et al.. Maternal Executive Functioning and Scaffolding in Families of Children with and without Parent-Reported ADHD. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (2017). doi:10.1007/s10802-017-0289-2