Negotiating Parental Accountability in the Face of Uncertainty for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Despite extensive research into attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), parents’ constructions of theirchildren’s behaviors have received limited attention. This is particularly true outside North American contexts, whereADHD is less established historically. Our research demonstrates how United Kingdom parents made sense of ADHDand their own identities postdiagnosis. Using discourse analysis from interviews with 12 parents, we show that theydrew from biological and social environmental repertoires when talking about their child’s condition, parallelingrepertoires found circulating in the United Kingdom media. However, in the context of parental narratives, both theserepertoires were difficult for parents to support and involved problematic subject positions for parental accountabilityin the child’s behavior. In this article we focus on the strategies parents used to negotiate these troublesome identitiesand construct accounts of moral and legitimate parenting in a context in which uncertainties surrounding ADHD existed and parenting was scrutinzed