Strengths-Based Parenting Coaching, Self-Efficacy, and Emotional Regulation in First-Time Mothers of Children with ADHD: A Review
Dr. Kaushal Kapadia *
*Correspondence to: Dr. Kaushal Kapadia, Bond & Balance - Counselling & Psychological Services, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
Copyright
© 2026: Dr. Kaushal Kapadia. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received: 18 August 2026
Published: 01 September 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22228136
First-time mothers of children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) face a distinctive convergence of stressors: the ordinary uncertainties of a first parenting role combined with the elevated behavioural, relational, and self-regulatory demands associated with raising a child whose neurodevelopmental profile diverges from typical expectations. Parenting programs for ADHD have historically been organized around deficit-correction — teaching parents to manage noncompliance, inattention, and impulsivity — often at the cost of parental confidence and emotional wellbeing. Strengths-based parenting (SBP), an approach derived from positive psychology that emphasizes the deliberate identification and cultivation of a child's (and, by coaching extension, a parent's own) positive qualities and capacities, offers a complementary and potentially corrective framework. This review synthesizes theoretical work on strengths-based parenting and parental self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977, 1997; Waters, 2015a, 2015b), examines the emerging evidence base for strength-based and positively-oriented parent coaching interventions, and considers their specific applicability to first-time mothers of children with ADHD — a population characterized by heightened parenting stress, self-efficacy deficits, and emotion dysregulation. The review further addresses the sociocultural context of Indian first-time mothers, where intergenerational caregiving norms, ADHD stigma, and limited early-intervention infrastructure shape both the need for, and the design of, such coaching interventions. Mechanisms of change, methodological limitations of the existing literature, and priority directions for future controlled research — including the current absence of India-specific trials — are discussed.
Keywords: strengths-based parenting, parent coaching, parental self-efficacy, emotional regulation, ADHD, first-time mothers, positive psychology.
Introduction
The transition to motherhood is, under typical circumstances, associated with substantial psychological adjustment, as new mothers renegotiate identity, relational roles, and their own sense of competence (parental self-efficacy) in the caregiving role. When the child in question has, or is later diagnosed with, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), this adjustment process is frequently complicated by behavioural unpredictability, heightened caregiving demands, and a parenting environment in which conventional developmental expectations and disciplinary strategies often prove ineffective. Parents of children with ADHD consistently report elevated parenting stress and depleted parental self-efficacy relative to parents of typically developing children, alongside a greater reliance on authoritarian or permissive parenting practices under duress (Child ViReal Support Program literature, as reviewed below). For first-time mothers in particular, who have no prior parenting experience against which to calibrate their child's behaviour, the absence of a normative comparison can intensify self-doubt, self-blame, and difficulty regulating their own emotional responses to their child's dysregulation.
The majority of established parenting interventions for childhood ADHD — including behavioural parent training programs derived from social learning theory — are oriented primarily around deficit correction: reducing noncompliance, managing disruptive behaviour, and improving parental use of contingency management. While such programs carry a well-established evidence base for improving child behavioural outcomes, reviews of parental engagement and dropout have identified low parental self-efficacy and self-confidence as a significant barrier to sustained participation and benefit, particularly among mothers who already feel that parenting difficulties reflect personal failure (Overcoming Barriers to Effective Early Parenting Interventions literature, as reviewed below). This review examines strengths-based parenting (SBP) coaching — an approach grounded in positive psychology that explicitly foregrounds the identification and cultivation of positive qualities, both in the child and, through coaching extension, in the parent herself — as a complementary framework with the potential to directly target the self-efficacy and emotion-regulation deficits that undermine deficit-focused approaches. The review synthesizes the theoretical basis of SBP and parental self-efficacy, evaluates the empirical evidence for strength-based and positively oriented parent coaching, considers the specific relevance of this approach to first-time mothers of children with ADHD, and examines its transportability to the Indian sociocultural context.
Theoretical Foundations
Strengths-Based Parenting
Strengths-based parenting has been defined as a style of parenting that seeks to deliberately identify and cultivate positive states, positive processes, and positive qualities in one's children (Waters, 2015a). Strength-oriented parents both recognize what their child is able to do well and actively encourage the child to practice, use, and further develop both realized and as-yet-unrealized strengths (Waters, 2015a; Waters & Sun, 2017). Distinct from Baumrind's classic authoritative-authoritarian-permissive typology, which characterizes parenting primarily along dimensions of warmth and control, SBP is oriented around a specific cognitive-affective practice: the ongoing labelling, reinforcement, and scaffolding of a child's strengths, independent of parenting style more broadly (Waters, 2015a, 2015b). A parallel and closely related strand of positive-psychology research has extended SBP principles to parents themselves, examining whether brief strength-based coaching — teaching parents to identify and draw upon their own character strengths in the parenting role — can directly improve parental self-efficacy and positive affect (Waters & Sun, 2017).
Empirical work on SBP in children and adolescents has associated the approach with reduced child stress, increased use of strength-based coping, greater life satisfaction, and — via self-efficacy as a mediating mechanism — improved wellbeing and reduced anxiety, depression, and general distress (Waters, 2015a, 2015b; Jach et al., 2018). Although this literature has developed primarily with typically developing school-aged children and adolescents, its central mechanism — that identifying and reinforcing a child's (and a parent's own) competencies builds self-efficacy, which in turn supports emotional regulation and reduces distress — offers a directly relevant theoretical rationale for coaching interventions with parents of children whose behavioural profile might otherwise be construed almost entirely in deficit terms.
Parental Self-Efficacy
Parental self-efficacy, derived from Bandura's (1977, 1997) broader self-efficacy theory, refers to a parent's belief in her own competence to successfully perform the parenting role and to positively influence her child's behaviour and development. Bandura's model identifies four principal sources through which self-efficacy beliefs are built: mastery experiences (direct successful performance), vicarious experience (observing similar others succeed), verbal persuasion (encouragement and constructive feedback from credible others), and the interpretation of one's own physiological and affective states. Parenting self-efficacy has been shown to function as a robust predictor of parenting behaviour and child outcomes: mothers with higher self-efficacy tend to provide more responsive, consistent, non-punitive caregiving, show greater persistence in the face of child behavioural difficulty, and report lower parenting stress and better mental health, whereas low self-efficacy is associated with coercive parenting, negative coping, and heightened emotional reactivity toward the child (see the review of positive-discipline group intervention effects below). Critically, efficacy beliefs appear to exert a proportionally greater influence on parenting behaviour under high-stress conditions than under low-stress conditions — a finding of direct relevance to mothers of children with ADHD, whose day-to-day caregiving frequently occurs under conditions of elevated behavioural unpredictability and stress.
Coaching interventions that explicitly target the Bandura sources of efficacy — structuring opportunities for parents to identify and reflect on recent parenting successes (mastery), share experiences within a group of similarly situated parents (vicarious experience), receive structured strengths-based feedback from a coach (verbal persuasion), and reframe physiological arousal during difficult parenting moments — have been proposed as a mechanistically coherent route to building parental self-efficacy specifically among parents of children with elevated behavioural or neurodevelopmental needs (see gifted/ADHD parental stress literature below).
Emotional Regulation in Parenting
A mother's capacity to regulate her own emotional responses — particularly frustration, guilt, and anxiety arising during difficult caregiving interactions — has been increasingly recognized as both an outcome in its own right and a mechanism through which parenting interventions affect child behaviour. Parental emotion dysregulation has been linked to more coercive and reactive parent-child interaction cycles, which in the context of ADHD may exacerbate the child's own difficulties with self-regulation, given the well-documented bidirectional and often intergenerational transmission of self-regulatory capacity within the parent-child dyad. Interventions that build parental self-efficacy have been theorized to concurrently support emotional regulation, insofar as a parent who feels more confident in her capacity to manage a given behavioural challenge is likely to appraise that challenge as less threatening and to respond with less physiological and emotional reactivity — a pathway consistent with transactional models linking self-efficacy, cognitive appraisal, and affect regulation.
Empirical Evidence for Strengths-Based and Positively Oriented Parent Coaching
Direct empirical evaluation of SBP-based coaching interventions for parents remains a comparatively young literature. Waters and Sun (2017) conducted the first published evaluation of a brief, three-week strength-based parenting intervention (N = 137), using a quasi-experimental waitlist-comparison design, in which parents were taught to identify and cultivate strengths in both themselves and their children. Relative to the waitlist comparison group, parents who completed the intervention showed significant gains in parental self-efficacy — greater confidence and perceived ability to successfully raise their children — alongside increases in positive emotion, providing initial proof-of-concept evidence that a brief strengths-focused coaching format can directly move parental self-efficacy.
Related, non-SBP-labelled positive-parenting interventions provide converging evidence for the broader mechanism. A positive discipline group intervention for mothers of young children produced significant improvements in parenting self-efficacy from a pre-intervention mean of 25.00 (SD = 4.08) to a post-intervention mean of 36.29 (SD = 2.99), a very large effect (Cohen's d = 3.16), with gains sustained at three-month follow-up and no corresponding change in a control group. An attachment-based parenting intervention for mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder similarly produced significant improvements in parental self-efficacy and maternal mental health at six-month follow-up relative to a non-randomized control group, alongside improvements in child behavioural and emotional problems as rated by mothers — demonstrating that self-efficacy-focused coaching approaches can generalize to parents of children with neurodevelopmental and behavioural differences specifically, and that maternal and child outcomes tend to move together.
Within ADHD-specific populations, research has more often examined parental self-efficacy as a moderator, mediator, or secondary outcome within broader multimodal parent-training programs than as the primary target of a dedicated strengths-based intervention. The Child ViReal Support Program, a multi-level, evidence-based parent-and-child intervention evaluated in a small randomized crossover trial, targeted parenting stress, parental self-efficacy, parenting practices, and child ADHD core symptoms concurrently, reflecting a growing recognition within the ADHD parent-training literature that parental self-efficacy is not merely incidental to treatment but a legitimate and modifiable treatment target in its own right. Similarly, an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy-based parenting intervention evaluated among parents of children with co-occurring asthma and ADHD examined psychological flexibility and parenting competence as central mechanisms of family functioning and parental adjustment, underscoring the broader shift within this literature toward process- and strength-oriented, rather than purely deficit-corrective, mechanisms of change. Reviews of parent and child perceptions of strength in ADHD populations further note that both parents and children with ADHD are able to reliably identify domains of genuine strength (e.g., creativity, energy, spontaneity, resilience), and argue that utilizing these identified strengths to support areas of difficulty may benefit the wellbeing of the family unit as a whole, extending strength-based approaches from the school setting into the home.
Taken together, this literature suggests convergent, if not yet definitive, support for the proposition that strengths-based and positively oriented coaching can meaningfully improve parental self-efficacy, with plausible downstream benefits for maternal emotional regulation and child behavioural outcomes. However, no published randomized controlled trial to date has evaluated a dedicated strengths-based parenting coaching protocol specifically among first-time mothers of children with a formal ADHD diagnosis, representing a clear gap that this review's target population directly addresses.
The First-Time Mother of a Child with ADHD: A Distinctive Risk and Opportunity Profile
First-time mothers occupy a distinctive position within this literature. Without the benefit of a prior child against which to normalize behaviour, first-time mothers of children later diagnosed with ADHD often experience a prolonged period of uncertainty and self-doubt prior to diagnosis, during which ambiguous or dismissive feedback from family members and professionals can further erode nascent parental self-efficacy. Because mastery experiences — one of Bandura's core efficacy-building mechanisms — accumulate specifically through direct successful parenting performance, first-time mothers have, definitionally, a narrower reservoir of prior mastery experience to draw upon than multiparous mothers, plausibly heightening their vulnerability to efficacy deficits when early caregiving proves more difficult than anticipated. At the same time, this same absence of an established parenting identity may render first-time mothers particularly responsive to coaching interventions delivered early, before entrenched negative self-appraisals and coercive interactional patterns have consolidated — suggesting a developmental window in which strengths-based coaching, delivered proximal to diagnosis, may be maximally effective.
Research examining parental stress and self-efficacy among parents of children with ADHD (including in comorbid presentations such as intellectual giftedness with ADHD) has found that the interaction between a child's neurodevelopmental profile and parental gender is associated with reduced parental self-efficacy specifically, over and above general increases in parenting stress, with recommendations that structured parent groups explicitly informed by Bandura's self-efficacy framework — beginning sessions by guiding parents to identify a recent parenting success, and structuring peer-group sharing and credible encouragement — represent a promising clinical avenue for this population. This recommendation maps closely onto the structural features of strengths-based parent coaching, lending further theoretical support to its applicability for first-time mothers of children with ADHD specifically.
Toward a Strengths-Based Coaching Model for First-Time Mothers of Children with ADHD
Drawing on the theoretical and empirical literature reviewed above, a coherent strengths-based parenting coaching model for this population would plausibly integrate several core components: (a) structured identification of the child's genuine strengths (e.g., creativity, energy, curiosity, spontaneity, resilience) as a counterweight to deficit-saturated diagnostic and school feedback; (b) parallel identification and cultivation of the mother's own character strengths and existing parenting competencies, directly targeting parental self-efficacy through Bandura's mechanism of mastery-experience reflection; (c) structured peer-group or coach-delivered encouragement functioning as verbal persuasion; (d) psychoeducation reframing ADHD-related behaviours within a neurodevelopmental rather than a moral or characterological framework, reducing self-blame and associated emotional reactivity; and (e) explicit emotion-regulation skill-building focused on the mother's own physiological and affective responses during difficult caregiving moments, consistent with Bandura's fourth efficacy source. Coaching delivered in a small-group format may additionally support vicarious learning, as first-time mothers observe other mothers successfully navigating comparable challenges.
Considerations for the Indian Context
First-time mothers of children with ADHD in India navigate a coaching-relevant context shaped by several intersecting factors. Extended and joint-family caregiving structures, common across much of urban and rural India, mean that a first-time mother's emerging parenting self-efficacy is frequently negotiated in relation to the parenting authority and, at times, direct criticism of mothers-in-law, grandparents, and other family elders — a dynamic that can either buffer or actively undermine efficacy-building, depending on whether the family's stance toward the child's ADHD-related behaviour is supportive or blaming. Stigma surrounding neurodevelopmental and behavioural differences remains substantial in many Indian communities, and mothers are frequently — implicitly or explicitly — held individually responsible for a child's disruptive behaviour, a social framing directly at odds with the reattribution work central to strengths-based coaching. Awareness and diagnostic infrastructure for childhood ADHD also remain unevenly distributed across India, with many first-time mothers in smaller cities and rural areas obtaining a formal diagnosis considerably later than mothers in metropolitan centers, extending the period of unexplained behavioural difficulty and associated self-doubt described above.
At the same time, several features of the Indian context may favour the transportability of strengths-based coaching specifically. Group-based, community, and extended-family-inclusive formats of intervention delivery are culturally congruent with collectivist caregiving norms and may be more readily accepted than individually delivered Western clinical models. India's severe shortage of specialist child mental health professionals relative to population need (Gururaj et al., 2016) similarly favours brief, coach- or lay-facilitator-deliverable formats of the kind SBP coaching has, in principle, been shown to support. Given the complete absence, to this review's knowledge, of any published Indian trial evaluating strengths-based parenting coaching among mothers of children with ADHD, this review identifies the design, cultural adaptation, and controlled evaluation of such a coaching model — ideally incorporating extended-family psychoeducation components addressing intergenerational caregiving dynamics — as a clear and clinically significant research priority.
Limitations of the Existing Literature
Several limitations constrain confident conclusions from the current evidence base. First, direct empirical tests of SBP-labelled coaching remain limited to a small number of studies, several of which used quasi-experimental rather than randomized designs, non-clinical samples, and brief follow-up windows. Second, the ADHD parent-training literature has generally examined parental self-efficacy and emotional regulation as secondary or mediating outcomes within larger multimodal programs rather than as primary targets of a dedicated strengths-based protocol, limiting the ability to isolate the independent contribution of a strengths-based component. Third, existing studies rarely disaggregate outcomes by parity, such that the specific efficacy trajectory of first-time mothers, as distinct from multiparous mothers, remains empirically underexamined despite the theoretical rationale outlined above. Finally, cultural adaptation procedures for non-Western and specifically Indian populations are, at present, entirely absent from the published SBP-coaching literature.
Future Directions
Priority directions for future research include: (a) adequately powered randomized controlled trials evaluating a dedicated strengths-based parenting coaching protocol specifically among first-time mothers of children with a confirmed ADHD diagnosis, using validated parental self-efficacy and emotion-regulation measures administered pre-, post-, and at extended follow-up; (b) dismantling studies isolating the independent contribution of child-strength identification, parent-strength identification, and emotion-regulation coaching components; (c) parity-stratified analyses directly comparing efficacy trajectories of first-time versus multiparous mothers; (d) India-specific cultural adaptation and controlled evaluation incorporating extended-family psychoeducation; and (e) longitudinal designs examining whether maternal self-efficacy and emotion-regulation gains mediate downstream improvements in child ADHD-related behavioural outcomes and the mother-child relationship.
Conclusion
Strengths-based parenting coaching offers a theoretically coherent and empirically promising complement to conventional, deficit-focused ADHD parent training, with particular relevance to first-time mothers, whose limited prior mastery experience and heightened vulnerability to self-doubt make them a plausible population of maximal benefit. Existing evidence, though still limited in volume and specificity, converges on the proposition that structured, strength-oriented coaching can meaningfully build parental self-efficacy and, by extension, support maternal emotional regulation. Realizing this promise for first-time mothers of children with ADHD — and particularly within the Indian sociocultural and family context — will require dedicated, adequately powered, and culturally adapted controlled trials, a gap this review identifies as a priority for future research.
References