Parenting with ADHD can be overwhelming. If you're not treated, you might not have the organizational skills to keep up with your kids' schedules. You might also find it stressful to manage your child's behavior. It's more common for women to learn they have ADHD in adulthood.
ADHD causes kids to be more inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive than is normal for their age. ADHD makes it harder for kids to develop the skills that control attention, behavior, emotions, and activity. As a result, they often act in ways that are hard for parents manage.
Impulse control deficits may also cause parents to lash out and complicate already-challenging situations. Organizing supplies and schedules: Managing family logistics and routines requires unwavering organizational skills, a known difficulty with ADHD.
Having ADHD doesn't make you a bad mother! On the contrary, having ADHD gives you the ability to empathize with your children, come up with creative solutions for problems, and create a loving, nurturing and exciting home for you and your family. Learn to appreciate the gifts and minimize the weaknesses of ADHD.
In between these two extremes is authoritative parenting, a distinct style that decades of research has shown to be the most effective. Authoritative parents are nurturing and empathetic, but they also set very clear expectations and reliably hold their kids accountable.
Research has found that people with ADHD have more creativity and idea generation than people without the disorder. 3 This can lead to outside-the-box thinking that is so important for innovation. Hyper-focus: Many people with ADHD become hyper-focused on things that interest them.
Best Occupations for People with ADHD
Because of their unique ability to solve problems and create systems when interested in their work, Roberts says many people with ADHD do well as entrepreneurs, computer programmers, and within creative industries.
Mothers with ADHD are dynamic, socially anxious, creative, disorganized, passionate, emotionally sensitive, and sometimes all of the above at the same time. No two moms with ADD are alike, but many of their children recall similar snapshots of growing up under the umbrella of neurodivergence.
Moms with untreated ADHD often report feeling disorganized, distracted & incredibly overwhelmed (one mom told me: “I feel like I have a bunch of tabs open in the browser in my brain, and I just cannot figure out how to close any of them.”) For some moms, that looks like having trouble getting started on tasks/ ...
Other parents with ADHD talk about things such as persistent stacks of papers around the house, to-do lists created but never used, uncontrollable emotions and feelings of inadequacy, guilt and frustration because they can't seem to “get it together.”
By having ADHD, moms experience the telltale ADHD and executive function symptoms that show up as difficulties regulating attention, emotion, energy, and effort. Because we are women, we also experience gendered pressure/judgment about our functioning (Solden & Frank, 2019).
The impact of ADHD on parenting
Parents with ADHD may feel overwhelmed and stressed, which can impact their mental health and well-being. They may also struggle to provide a stable and consistent home environment for their children, which can impact their emotional and social development.
The husband without AD/HD may misinterpret his wife's disorganization and procrastination as deliberate offenses. If the wife goes on an impulsive spending spree, it may damage family finances. The urge for novel situations can lead some women into repeated job changes or promiscuity.
Usually, the most difficult times for persons with ADHD are their years from middle school through the first few years after high school. Those are the years when students are faced with the widest range of tasks to do and the least opportunity to escape from the tasks that they struggle with or find to be boring.
A lack of self-acceptance. Prohibitively expensive medications. Here, commiserate with fellow ADDitude readers as they share some of their biggest challenges of managing life with ADHD or ADD. > Creating rituals to keep track of things.
That's a classic executive function and impulse-control problem. “Rude” behavior can also stem from misinterpretation of social cues and interactions. Inattention causes people with ADHD to miss parts of social interactions.
Is ADHD inherited from Mom or Dad? You can inherit genes that boost risk for ADHD from your mother, from your father or from both parents.
Overwhelm is a feeling all too familiar to anyone with ADHD or neurodiversity. When you're constantly bombarded with stimuli and your to-do list seems impossible to manage, it's easy to feel like you're drowning. One of the best ways to combat overwhelm is to write things down.
Interestingly, girls with untreated ADHD may be more likely to blame and judge themselves for these problems, leading to a higher risk for low self-esteem than boys who have ADHD. They may also be more likely to have problems with substance abuse, eating disorders, and anxiety.
Women with ADHD face the same feelings of being overwhelmed and exhausted as men with ADHD commonly feel. Psychological distress, feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem, and chronic stress are common. Often, women with ADHD feel that their lives are out of control or in chaos, and daily tasks may seem impossibly huge.
The Social Immaturity factor was composed of items that are not what one might typically expect to be prototypical of the ADHD child: clingy, preferring younger children, clumsy, and acting young, which may overlap with the social deficits of PDD.
ADHD Assessment & Treatment Centres
To legally protect the rights of people with ADHD in Australia, under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA), a person's ADHD must be classed as a disability according to the criteria as specified in the DDA. DDA disability definition criteria relevant to people with ADHD: 1.
Autism is very distinct from ADHD, but the core symptoms of ADHD-Combined type, i.e., attention deficit, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, would appear to also be features of autism. ASD and ADHD are neurobiological disorders characterized by similar underlying neuropsychological “deficits”.