Talking ADHD: understanding disclosure decisions in parents of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Parents of children with ADHD often need to make disclosure decisions about their child’s ADHD diagnosis on behalf of their child. While disclosure can provide increased access to resources and support, it can also lead to stigma and discrimination. Hence, parents often find these decisions stressful, contributing to caregiver burden. Given that ADHD is one of the most common childhood neurodevelopmental conditions, we wanted to better understand this decision-making process in parents of children with ADHD. While disclosure decisions might be similar to those made about other conditions, it is possible that unique aspects of ADHD could bring about different challenges. Method: We recruited 15 parents of children aged 5-11 years old who had been diagnosed with ADHD. We conducted semi-structured interviews about their lived experience of making disclosure decisions about their child’s ADHD. Interview recordings were transcribed, and reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Results: Five themes were organised to follow the decision-making process parents go through, starting with “consider the target of disclosure”, followed by four themes reflecting different goals parents had in disclosure situations: “benefit the child”, “manage stigma”, “access support” and “express identity”. We found no evidence of complete concealment. The groups of people that parents frequently made disclosure decisions about were (1) child’s school, (2) family members, (3) friends and (4) medical professionals. Medication was disclosed less often compared to the ADHD diagnosis itself. Conclusions: Results highlighted a lack of support for parents through this decision-making process, and the opportunity to develop ways to provide that support in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".