I was diagnosed with ADHD when my daughters were well into their teenage years. The hustle of bedtime routines, coaxing, and schedule managing were mostly behind me, but when I learned of my official diagnosis, my thoughts immediately zoomed back to my years of parenting young kids.
“It all makes sense now,” I remember thinking.
Like most Gen X women with undiagnosed ADHD, I wove my way through school and university without IEPs, neurodivergent-savvy teachers, or even the personal recognition that my lack of focus was not due to laziness or ineptitude.
Once formal education was in the rearview, though, I slowly became defined by my competence, rather than my spaciness. Sure, I was a pro-masker, but more importantly: I now had people and pursuits that held my attention. My creativity and knack for thinking sharply on the fly helped me thrive. I still lost my keys all the time, but life no longer felt like such a slog.
And then, I had kids.
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” I often thought. But it was hard. It was so hard.
Parenting With ADHD
Every tantrum felt like my nervous system was strapped into an electric chair. Interruptions (hundreds per day) shook the contents of my brain upside down like a snow globe; by the time they settled, I had lost the plot. Getting my kids out the door made me rage, or cry, at least twice a week.
When you adore your children – as I do – finding parenting to be a grind produces a lot of guilt and self-criticism. “It shouldn’t be this hard” is the refrain that moms with ADHD hear inside as they wrangle, hustle, and white knuckle it through their days. It doesn’t help that ‘make it look easy’ seems to be the unspoken credo guiding modern motherhood. At our Vancouver and North Vancouver counselling clinics, our team of therapists sees dozens of moms a day who talk about these things.
Understanding the Disconnect
Executive function is the set of mental skills that help with planning, organization, focus, and managing time. Moms with ADHD often find these skills harder to access consistently, which can make everyday parenting tasks feel much heavier. It’s hard enough to keep your own life on the rails; now, you’re the commander in chief for other people’s lives. And every ball dropped shudders with shame.
Overburdened moms don’t need an ADHD diagnosis to give themselves two key things: validation and permission. The validation being: It makes sense that this is hard! And the permission: go do what you need to make things way easier.
Giving yourself permission to rest, say no to people, and drop the mask is often the hardest part (hello, therapy). But you’re a busy mom, and you need sanity, now.
How to Start Making Your Day Easier
Taking your nervous system down a few notches doesn’t only need to be via therapy or a luxury retreat, or even weekly yoga. Sometimes the most impact comes from the daily tweaks that give your brain a little bit more ease.
Let’s start with dinner.
Most moms today are raising kids without the kind of “village” that once helped with meals, childcare, and household tasks. Between work, school runs, and activities, dinner often feels like the breaking point. Witching hour? More like ‘disaster management’ hour.
I was quite self-satisfied by my creative approach to cooking, until I had kids. Picky eaters, who didn’t appreciate the flavour explosion I created. Picky eaters who also psychologically disintegrated if they didn’t eat by 6pm. Also, a husband who was increasingly un-amused by the mess my experiments left behind.
Thirty-minute meals that also happen to be nourishing just don’t come naturally to me. My own mom would feed us fish sticks or Chef-boy-ar-dee on those nights when her mental load was too high, but maternal aspirations have changed since the eighties, I guess (I turned out just fine, Mom!!)
Introducing Guilt Free Dinners
The mental load of creating a meal after a full day of work, daycare and school pickup, and activities was hurting me. I’m pretty sure the food I cooked tasted like resentment, too. And while I am loath to squander money on meal courier services, meal kits have been a game changer for me.
Oh, I resisted! Paying for pre-chopped veggies? I scoffed at the thought. But a friend gifted me a few free meals, and I was hooked. Just removing the daily “What’s for dinner?” question, and not needing to worry about whether I’d need to stop by the grocery store helped make the witching hour in my household a bit more manageable.
If you’re a mom with ADHD, planning, organising, and managing time – alongside a background of noisy, hangry kids – can be tremendously overstimulating. So I don’t think of meal prep services as a luxury. I think of them as self-care.
Get to know some of our moms on staff and find a counsellor who gets you.
Nicci is a mom to an active 4 year old son, and one of the therapists in our Mom Rage Reset program. Nicci has travelled the world with her family and has been deeply influenced by seeing how other cultures approach parenting and family life. Nicola sees clients exclusively online, and offers evening and weekend appointments.
Cat is a therapist on our North Shore team who specializes in maternal mental health and caregiver fatigue. As the mom to a 7-year old daughter, she has an intimate understanding of the joys and pressures of balancing a growing career with parenting. Cat offers depth psychotherapy as well as practical tools for overwhelmed moms. She is also a therapist in our Mom Rage Reset program.
Amy is the mom of two teenage kids, and she works with moms who long to find some peace and sturdiness in the intensity of raising kids, sustaining a marriage, and building a career. Amy sees couples and individuals in our Kitsilano clinic.