Seizing opportunity: Homeschool parents teaching social skills to their children with ADHD

Until this investigation, there has been a scarcity of research on parents' teaching of social skills to their children who have ADHD, in homeschools. The participants included 10 families who resided in different regions throughout the United States. The social skills that parents taught in homeschools were compared to those that Elliott and Gresham (1991) implemented in traditional school settings, by employing within-case and cross-case analyses. Videotaping documented the homeschool parents' teaching methods. Separate interviews of homeschool parents and their children were voice recorded. Inter-observer reliability was 80%.; The homeschool parents taught six of Elliott and Gresham's (1991) social skills and 29 of the non-Elliott and Gresham social skills from a total of 61 social skills. These social skills incorporated Elliott and Gresham's (1991) paradigm, minimally. The parents predominantly taught the non-Elliott and Gresham social skills to reduce the symptoms of their children's ADHD. They taught 70% of the social skills to their children as unforecasted and 30% as forecasted. The parents taught a majority of both types of social skills on random rather than on successive days, indirectly and in opportunistic response to the socially inappropriate behavior that their children exhibited. They took advantage of the opportunity when their children exhibited socially inappropriate behavior and taught those social skills by using an "immediate situation" approach.; This research considered whether homeschool parents taught their children these social skills by using interventions employed by Elliott and Gresham (1991) or through other interventions. The homeschool parents did not employ any of Elliott and Gresham's (1991) social skills interventions. Instead, they modified the context, the homeschool, which then shaped the social skills that the parents taught; the modified conditions and the activities of the homeschool became part of the intervention that the homeschool parents employed to teach social skills to their children. Limitations of this research included a lack of checks on consistent applications of code definitions as well as on Elliott and Gresham's (1991) social skills interventions.