4 Ways to Make Parenting With ADHD Less Overwhelming

Hello, Brains! As an ADHD expert, I have consumed a ton of information and advice about ADHD. And as a new mom, I have consumed a ton of parenting information and advice. And now I have converged them! My four tips for making life easier for yourself as a parent with ADHD. Tip number one do less.

There is so much pressure and there will always be pressure to do more. Your kid is behind. What about Jimmy? Jimmy is also doing soccer and Jimmy's doing this. And Jimmy's doing that. Your kid doesn't have to. Right? Like I am definitely guilty of this. And from the moment my daughter was born, people were telling me, enjoy every moment. And I took that literally. I tried to cram so much joy into every moment. I tried to do all of the things that I was excited about, that she made either of us happy. And you know what? We ended up both real unhappy. So do less. Don't try to do all of the things. Curate, curate down to the things that matter most to you, right now. And if you can't get it down to that, go in seasons. Okay. Right now you're doing swim lessons. If you're going to also do gymnastics, maybe stop the swim lessons and go do gymnastics for a while. Every single activity that we do adds not only the time and the executive function to get to and from that activity, but also all of these new relationships that you have to remember that kids name and what that mom likes and who's allergic to what. And there are jobs that crop up. I put my daughter in a two hour a week co-op preschool that turns out to be ten hours a week of commitment in terms of socializing, in terms of paperwork, in terms of the jobs that I have to do in the snacks cut. We take on too much. This would be too much for anybody. But because we like new, because we like novel, because we get excited and overcommit. We are committing to way too much. So that is the first tip that I am telling myself, my future self and also you: do less. What is more important than doing all of the things is being present for the things you are doing, and being able to be there for that. And by the way, everybody needs downtime. You need downtime. So does your kid. Do less.

2. Externalize more. We are usually trying to hold way too much in our head. The mental load is real and it's hard. And it's even harder when you have ADHD. The more we can get out of our own head, the better, not only for our own mental load, but also so that we don't have to be interrupted every time somebody else in our family needs to know where they need to be, where the scissors are. It's better if we can get this stuff out of our heads so that we are not carrying it all. get it out of your head and into the shared family space. one way that my partner and I do this is we have a shared email so that if we get emailed about something to do with our child, we both get that information. I don't have to take on the extra burden of reading the email, understanding the email, explaining the email to him. We both get that information. another way to do that is labeling bins and putting them in clear zones so that everyone in your family knows where to look for something so they don't have to come to you. And by the way, those labels can also help you to. and probably one of the most important ways, and something I hear again and again from parents in this community is to have a family hub, Your family hub can be as easy as a calendar. You hang on the wall and you write down what's going on, what day, where people need to be. You can do a whiteboard. Some people use their fridge. That's where you put notes and updates, and there's lots of different ways to do it. I use Skylight calendar to externalize a lot. It is a digital household hub. It's a nice upgrade from, like, a large paper calendar on the wall or a dry erase board because it's digital, but it's still a physical object in your house, so it's still kind of is that visual cue to remind people to check it. it has two-way sync with Google Calendar, which is what we use. So I'm able to automatically sync my events. My partner's able to sync his events, our family calendar events are all synced to this. And then because it has two way sync, if we need to change something, if we change it right from the skylight, it also changes it on the Google Calendar, which is really good. I've talked about skylight a lot before, I really, really like it. A lot of people in this community use it. if you've seen me talk about it before, you probably know I'm pretty excited about the meal planning feature. It's a way to externalize, like, what is it that we're eating? There are recipes that you can add to it. You can have it help you build recipes. I'll be honest, I'm not there yet. Like, we just every week, I'm like, hey, can we meal plan for the week? And we're all like, no, we are too overwhelmed to do that. So what I finally realized is I don't need to know exactly what we're having every meal of the week. I just need to know who's responsible for it. And that's where we're at right now. So that's what I've done. when we were talking about it, he's like, oh, yeah, I just figure I'm handling breakfast. I'm like, cool. I didn't know that. So let's externalize it. Let's get it on the calendar. You are the one making breakfast. Cool. Let's put that on the calendar. So we are both aware of the fact that you are the one making breakfast. And if I'm planning on cooking, let me let him know because then he knows not to worry about it that night. skylight is also a good place to externalize tasks. So there are a lot of times where he's like, oh yeah, I'm handling this. I'm like, I didn't know you were handling it, or he doesn't know that I need him to handle something. So we get we try to get all of that out of our brains. Having a household hub helps ensure that you do not become the household hub. it's also empowering for the other people in your household to be able to see what's going on without having to come and ask you. You can try at risk free for the first half of the school year with Skylight's Four month money back guarantee. the skylight is available internationally, but if you live in the US, you can save $30 on either the 15 inch calendar or the 27 inch calendar max with my code HOWTOADHD30 for the first time ever, the code works on either skylight, either the 15 inch or the 27 inch, so you can get whichever one is right for you. the important thing is to get the information out of your head, put it somewhere where everybody has access to it so that you are not the access point. Just like you don't want to be the keeper of all of the information, you don't want to necessarily be the keeper of time. So having something like the time timer so that you can tell other people like this is how long it will be until dinner is ready. It's a great way to externalize time so that you're not constantly being interrupted. Like, is dinner ready yet?

Three. Recharge regularly. before becoming parents, my partner and I could do the very ADHD thing of running ourselves into the ground and then needing a day to recharge. And we could take that day because we didn't have a kid yet. Right? Once we had a kid, we realized we can't do that. We can't just keep going until we run out of batteries, because we might run out of batteries in the middle of a diaper change or God forbid, bedtime. So while we might not have as much time to recharge, we do need to recharge more as a maintenance thing than as an emergency thing. Because you can't crash and then just be like, yes, I cannot parent today. Not an option. having regularly scheduled maintenance time where everybody knows that you are taking a break, is going to be a lot more effective than trying to take the time when you need it. for one thing, everybody in your house can start to plan around it. I now know that when my partner gets home from work for an hour, I'm taking the kid. He needs his recharge time. He knows that for a few hours on Sunday night, I need him and the kid out of the house so that I can have the house to myself for my regularly scheduled maintenance time. This is just something that we build in, because if we don't, we're not going to get to recharge when we need it. And that's not going to be good for anybody. although I will point out that taking any time to recharge might rely on number four.

Let other people help. I know, you shouldn't need help. You can do it. I get it. Other people won't do it, right? You feel guilty asking for the help. I know, there are a lot of great reasons to not let other people help. But I will argue there are also some good reasons to let people help. One: People like to help. It gives them the opportunity to feel like they're contributing. They get to feel good about themselves. They want their dopamine hits to. They want to help. Let them help. Two: If you don't let people help who are going to be regularly around your child like your partner, they're not going to get better at it. if there's a disparity between how well you can do it and how well they can do it now, what do you think is going to happen if you then have years more experience than them? You're never going to get a break. They're not going to get any better because you are the one doing it all of the time, and you're going to get resentful and burnout. So let other people help. Let them try, let them fail, let them get better at it. Let them figure out their own way of doing it. for most things. That's okay. Most of the time, we need the help more than we need for it to be done exactly the way that we do it. Although our brains might try to convince us otherwise. Speaking from experience. Three if they're helping with your child, it builds their relationship with your child. We want our children to have a strong social support network. We want them to be able to be okay when we're not around. And one of the ways that can happen is if we let other people build up those relationships. And one way that they can build up their relationships with our children is by performing care tasks for them. And if we are insisting on doing all of the care tasks, we're actually hurting our kids relationship with these other people in their lives. their other parent or Alo parents, people who are not parents, but our helping to raise your child because it really does take a village. And also, it's good practice for us to learn to recognize where we might need help, where we might want help, where the help is helpful versus where it actually is something that we would like to do. it gives us experience to it gives us the practice, in learning to figure out what we need and where people can help and how to ask for that help and accept that help and the discomfort of being helped. That's all good for our personal growth as well. All right. To recap, these are my top four tips.

Do less, externalize more, recharge regularly and let other people help. if you're a parent with ADHD, I would love for you to weigh in. Please let me know in the comments below. Is there anything that I missed? Which of these do you already do and how do you do it? I would love, love specific examples of what to do. I am still new to this parenting journey. My daughter is 18 months. What is that? A 16. 5 years to go? At least Thank you to our brain advocates and all our Patreon brains

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