If you’ve ever got your child to school and thought, “How is it only 8:42am, and I already feel like I’ve lived three lifetimes?”… you’re in the right place.
Recently, I was listening (running, obviously, because ADHD brains love a bit of movement) to an episode of the ADHD Chatter podcast featuring Alex Partridge and psychiatrist Dr. Asad Raffi. At one point, Asad said something that made me stop in my tracks:
He joked that neither he nor Alex, two wildly successful ADHD men, would survive a single day in the shoes of an ADHD woman.
And honestly? He’s right.
Because ADHD motherhood is not just ADHD plus children. It’s ADHD layered with hormones, societal expectations, invisible labour, sensory overwhelm, emotional regulation, and the relentless cultural pressure to be the calm, organised glue holding everything together.
It’s an impossible web of chaos, and I’ve spent the last 10 years figuring out how to navigate it so I can help other ADHD parents just like me.
Let’s talk about why it feels so hard — and why you are not failing.
The ADHD Morning: A Daily Olympic Event for ADHD Parents
Let’s take something as simple as a school morning. On paper, it sounds manageable:
🧠 Wake up
🧠 Get dressed
🧠 Eat breakfast
🧠 Brush teeth
🧠 Put on shoes
🧠 Out the door
In reality? It’s an executive functioning decathlon.
Even the most basic morning routine requires:
🧠 Starting tasks (initiation)
🧠 Planning and sequencing
🧠 Organisation
🧠 Time management
🧠 Working memory
🧠 Avoiding distractions (inhibition)
🧠 Task shifting
That’s seven separate brain skills before you’ve even had a sip of coffee.
Here’s the kicker:
Your child is still developing these skills. Because of executive dysfunction, your brain likely struggles with each of them.
Yet somehow you’re expected to do it all, for everyone, with a smile. No wonder mornings feel like chaos.
A Very Typical ADHD Mum Morning (If You Know, You Know)
Mornings often start with good intentions. You’ve even got a lovely routine chart. You’re going to be patient today.
Then you check the weather. Then you see a message. Ten minutes later, you’re sitting half-dressed on the bed, scrolling, feeling like a teenager about to be caught doing something “naughty.”
One child is dressed and writing on tiny bits of paper while Taylor Swift plays in the background. The other is exactly where you left her thirty minutes ago.
Shame floods in.
You pull their clothes on too quickly. You shout. Everyone cries. Shame floods in again. Someone has made a fort out of sofa cushions. You’re late. Again.
And you think: Why can’t I just do what other mums do?
Let me tell you something clearly:
This is not laziness.
This is not selfishness.
This is ADHD.
ADHD Motherhood: Life on Hard Mode
ADHD is fundamentally a condition of executive functioning and nervous system regulation. Motherhood is fundamentally a job of executive functioning and nervous system regulation.
So when you put the two together, it becomes intense.
And that intensity is magnified for women because ADHD doesn’t show up in a vacuum. ADHD can appear in bodies shaped by hormones. It also emerges in cultures shaped by impossible expectations. And it affects homes where women are still expected to carry the mental load, even in “equal” partnerships.
It also shows up in families where neurodivergence is often genetic. Studies suggest ADHD is highly heritable, around 70–80%.
So many ADHD mums are parenting children who also struggle with emotional regulation, attention, impulse control, and sleep. You’re not just managing your brain. You’re lending your brain to everyone else.
Hormones and ADHD: The Missing Puzzle Piece for ADHD Parents
This is the bit that makes so many women wonder: Why did no one tell me this?
Oestrogen plays a key role in dopamine regulation, and dopamine is central to ADHD. When oestrogen drops, as it does postpartum, before periods, and in perimenopause, ADHD symptoms often increase:
🧠 More overwhelm
🧠 More brain fog
🧠 More irritability
🧠 More emotional dysregulation
🧠 Less capacity
Progesterone may also play a calming role, and its decline in perimenopause is one reason so many women are diagnosed in their late 30s and 40s.
This isn’t “you losing it.” This is biology meeting real life.
The Mother Load: Not Just Tasks, But Constant Cognitive Labour
You’ve heard of the mental load — the endless, invisible work of:
🧠 Remembering PE kits
🧠 Meal planning
🧠 Birthday presents
🧠 Appointments
🧠 After-school clubs
🧠 Laundry
🧠 Emotional management
Author Eve Rodsky, in Fair Play, highlights how disproportionately this load still falls on women.
And for an ADHD brain, already working hard to organise, remember, sequence, and prioritise, this load is crushing. It’s like trying to juggle while someone keeps adding extra flaming torches.
The Emotional Cushion: When Mum Becomes the Shock Absorber
Many mothers become the emotional cushion of the family:
🧠 The one who absorbs everyone’s stress
🧠 The one who stays calm
🧠 The one who holds it together
But what if Mum has ADHD?
Suppose she has spent her whole life masking.
Or maybe she grew up feeling “too emotional,” “too much,” “too sensitive”?
Then motherhood becomes a perfect storm:
🧠 The crying feels like an electric shock
🧠 The chaos feels unbearable
🧠 The pressure builds
And eventually, pow. She explodes. Then shame arrives. And the cycle repeats.
It’s not because she’s toxic; her nervous system is overloaded.
Read This Twice: You Are Not a Bad Mother
If you take one thing from this post, take this:
You are not failing because you shout.
You are not failing because you melt down.
You are not failing because motherhood feels harder for you.
These are signs of a chronically stressed system, not a broken character.
The question is not: “What is wrong with me?”
The question is: “What support have I been missing?”
The Most Powerful Shift: Support the Mum, Not Just the Child
The greatest gift you can give your children is not perfect calm. It’s a mother whose needs are met. A mother who has scaffolding. A mother who understands her brain. A mother who has a village.
This is what my work is about. And it’s what my upcoming book explores in depth, not with judgment or unrealistic advice, but with science, compassion, humour, and real-life strategies that actually work for ADHD families.
If This Felt Like Someone Describing Your Life…
Please know: you are not alone.
You are not a sh*t parent.
You are an ADHD parent doing an extraordinary job in an overwhelming world.
If you’d like more support, you can:
➡️ Preorder my book You’re Not a Sht Parent, You Have ADHD* (coming soon)
➡️ Join my community for neurodivergent families
➡️ Explore 1:1 coaching through Positively Parenting
Because you deserve parenting tools that work with your brain, not against it.
