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• Explore the effect of work-family conflict on parenting stress for ADHD families. • Identify work-family conflict as a potent contributor to parenting stress. • Non-working parents have higher parenting stress than employed parents do. • Chinese mothers experience higher parenting stress than fathers do. • More research is needed given the absence of work and parenting stress research. This paper reports the results of a one-time survey among Chinese families of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (n = 314) and families with typically developing (TD) children (n = 308) in mainland China, which aimed to examine the effects of the parenting role, work-family conflict, child ADHD symptoms, parental depression, anxiety, and somatization, parenting alliance, and social support on parenting stress. The results of the study have shown that (i) parents of children with ADHD experienced significantly higher levels of parenting stress than did parents of TD children; Chinese mothers experienced significantly higher parenting stress than fathers did; (ii) mothers of children with ADHD had more work-family conflict than mothers of TD children did; (iii) non-working parents had higher levels of parenting stress than the employed parents did; (iv) work-family conflict, depression, anxiety, and somatization, child ADHD symptoms, parenting role, and social support accounted for 40.9% of the variance in parenting stress; parenting alliances did not approach significance in the regression. Implications for social work practice and service development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]