Adolescents' hyperactivity, impulsivity, and attention problems (HIA) have been shown to make parents feel powerless. In this study, the authors examined whether these feelings were dependent on parents' experiences with their older children. Two models that offer different predictions of how parents make use of their earlier experiences when raising their later-born children were explored: the learningfrom-experience model and the spillover model. The authors used reports from 372 parents with 1 child (M^sub age^ -11.92) and 198 parents with 2 children (M^sub age^ = 11.89 and 14.35) from a small town in a European country. The results did not support a learning-from-experienceprocess. Instead, consistent with a spillover process, parents felt particularly powerless about their younger children with HIA if they also felt powerless about their older children. This study suggests that parents' experiences of raising their older children are important for their reactions to HIA in their younger childrenKey Words: adolescence, birth order, parent-child relations, parentingPeople learn from their experiences, positive as well as negative, and parents who have raised a child before have a unique source of knowledge when they raise their subsequent children. This knowledge might be especially relevant when parents encounter challenging behaviors in their younger children. The role that parents' experiences with their older children plays in their reactions to problematic behaviors in their younger children is still relatively unknown, though.Some behaviors are especially difficult for parents to deal with. Several studies have shown that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adolescents influences parents in a negative way (e.g., Johnson & Reader, 2002; Lange et ah, 2005; Mash & Johnston, 1983; Podolski & Nigg, 2001; Reader, Stewart, & Johnson, 2009). In a communitybased sample, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and attention problems (HIA) were shown to make parents feel powerless in their parenting role (Glatz, Stattin, & Kerr, 2011). This finding is consistent with Bugental's parental attribution model (Bugental, Mantyla, & Lewis, 1989; Bugental & Shennum, 1984), which focuses on parents' sense of power over caregiving failures and successes. According to this model, parents with a low sense of power perceive problematic child behaviors as difficult to change, and these perceptions are expected, in turn, to make parents behave negatively toward their children. Bugental's model has received substantial empirical support (for a review, see Bugental, 2009), and it seems to be useful for understanding how children's problematic behaviors are linked to parents' feelings and behaviors. How the processes described in this model might be affected or altered by parents' experiences with an earlier child, however, is unknown.Two general models-the learning-from experience model and the spillover model-have been presented in the literature to describe how parents use their earlier experiences when they raise their later born children (Shanahan, McHale, Osgood, & Crouter, 2007). These are based on a family system perspective (Minuchin, 1974) and take the dynamics within the family into consideration. In addition, both suggest that parents' experiences with their younger children can be partly explained by their experiences with their older children. The models, however, offer contrasting ideas about how parents make use of these experiences when they face problematic situations with their younger children.First, according to the learning-fromexperience model, the experience of having raised children before increases parents' abilities to deal with problems in their subsequent children. Hence, when parents face problems, they learn more efficient strategies to be able to handle similar problems in a better way in the future (Shanahan, McHale, Osgood, & Crouter, 2007). …