Self-esteem in children and adolescents with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A meta-analytic review

Meta-analytic methods were used to examine global and domain-specific (i.e., academic, social, behavioral) self-esteem in children and adolescents with and without ADHD. Potential moderators of effect size heterogeneity were also examined via meta-regressions within a three-level approach. Findings from 49 aggregated global self-esteem effect sizes (ADHD_N = 2500, TD_N = 9448), 12 academic self-esteem effect sizes (ADHD_N = 386, TD_N = 315), 11 social self-esteem effect sizes (ADHD_N = 258, TD_N = 254), and 8 behavioral self-esteem effect sizes (ADHD_N = 231, TD_N = 211) suggest that children and adolescents with ADHD experience moderate global (ES = 0.46, p < .001), academic (ES = 0.60, p = .009), and social (ES = 0.67, p = .001) self-esteem impairments compared to children and adolescents without the disorder. The aggregated behavioral self-esteem effect size (ES = 0.20, p = .54), however, was not significant, and the global self-esteem effect size was markedly smaller compared to effect sizes for the academic and social domains. Further, examination of potential moderators of effect size heterogeneity indicated null effects for medication status, diagnostic complexity, informant, age, sex, comorbid psychopathology, and self-esteem dimension. Collectively, findings suggest that children and adolescents with ADHD do not hold a ubiquitous negative self-perception of difficulties across academic, social, and behavioral domains of functioning, and unexamined domains that are distal to ADHD may serve to bolster global self-esteem.