I’ve been struggling with parenting my own three ND kids over the school holidays. The sensory overwhelm, the meltdowns, the constant bickering and bargaining. The mess piling up at the confluence of carelessness and boredom, multiplied by every hour they’re inside.
It’s hard being a parent when your kids are home all day, every day, without the structure and routine of school to build their time around, and only their siblings to take out their frustrations on. Add challenge points for each kid whose support needs are higher-than average due to differences in the way their brains process information and it’s like starting the game at expert-level difficulty even though you’ve never played before. Throw in my own AuDHD brain and it’s a perfect fuckstorm of unbearable chaos.
So of course, I Google.
In my search for the mythical Silver Bullet, some fast-acting panacea for the overwhelm of living a home full of wild beasts (myself included) that grow more feral by the hour, I’ve discovered a sucking void in the dialogue around parenting ND kids.
(Quick aside- ND, or Neurodivergent, is the generally accepted shorthand for people who are Autistic, ADHD, and/or a variety of other neurotypes or patterns of brain-ing that do not conform to the generally accepted norm, or NT – neurotypical – sort of brains that our society was designed around. I have personal experience with autism and ADHD, so I will refer mainly to those.)
“I am an adult who is autistic/ADHD and need a set of strategies that help me, with my heightened sensory sensitivities, my own difficulties regulating emotions, my tendency toward overwhelm, perfectionism, self loathing, and burnout, in being the parent that I needed as a kid.”
I invite you to try a few searches and see if you can guess what my problem is. Try any combination of the following search terms: Autistic ADHD Parent. Neurodiverse family school holidays survival. Please someone tell me how to make them stop.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Notice anything?
Here’s what I picked up on:
While there is a wealth of information aimed at parents of ND kids and how to cope with, understand, and/or manage their challenging behaviors, all the advice is addressed to parents assuming they have neurotypical brains and capabilities. In other words, it’s the kids who are ND, not the parent(s).
Go ahead, try again. Try autistic parenting advice. Try parenting with ADHD. Try if they make those mouth noises one more time, will my head actually collapse into a puddle of furious gelatine, or does it just feel like that because I haven’t had a break in weeks.
Yeah, you’re still getting a lot of articles about how parents can relate to their ND kids, without any consideration for the possibility that what you really meant was “I am an adult who is autistic/ADHD and need a set of strategies that help me, with my heightened sensory sensitivities, my own difficulties regulating emotions, my tendency toward overwhelm, perfectionism, self loathing, and burnout, in being the parent that I needed as a kid.”
Why is this a problem?
Because having a non-conforming neurotype is genetic. If your kid is ND, it’s pretty likely that at least one of the parents is too. Current research estimates approximate heiritability rates of 80-90% for ASD (Sandin et al., 2017), and similarly high rates of 75-85% for ADHD (Faraone and Larsson, 2019).
And I’m going to double down here and make a generalization that most of the information in the internet’s trove of parenting advice is geared toward mothers.
Fair enough too, because despite widespread recognition that it is invaluable for fathers to take an active role in child-rearing, it is still mostly mothers who act as the default parent in communication with schools, medical professionals, and social groups. It’s mums who book the appointments, arrange the playdates, attend the teacher-meetings, and then internalize the guilt over it all that somehow it’s their fault that their kid is struggling, because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to do (Offer and Schneider, 2011; Callahan, 2021; Baxter, 2021).
(another quick aside – there is a lot of overlap between the Queer community and the ND community, and I recognize that many people who grew up under the looming specter of girlhood do not currently identify as women or mothers, although they may face similar challenges that I am describing. In no way do I wish to exclude these folks from the discussion. However, as I am speaking from personal experience, I will use the terms “mother” and “woman” here, since that’s the construct around which my own identity is framed.)
But this isn’t a feminist rant about mental load and parental responsibility.
This is a cry for help.
An ND mother’s treacherous path to self-discovery
Adult women are seeking official diagnoses for autism and ADHD in droves (McCrossin, 2022).
A lot of them are mothers.
Despite a growing body of evidence that demonstrates that ADHD and Autism aren’t just “little boy problems,” and a push to broaden the diagnostic criteria to be more sensitive to the way autism and ADHD present in girls and women, underdiagnosis among the female half of the population continues to be an issue across the globe (Young et al., 2020; Hull et al., 2020; Boseley, 2023).
As a result, a generation of adult women, many of whom are mothers of young children, are suddenly rocking up to their psychiatrists’ offices claiming that they’ve felt misunderstood their entire lives and only began to suspect that a physio-chemical difference in their brain may be the reason for the unending pain of their inadequacy rather than a fundamental personal failure to ever be good enough.
And how do they come to this conclusion? Hint: it’s not because autism is “trending on TikTok” or “everyone’s a little autistic these days” or “they just want attention.”
Honestly. My eyes are rolling so hard right now that they might get stuck looking out the back of my skull.
Anyway.
It’s probably because their kid has gotten a diagnosis, and at some point in the process of doing the inevitable follow-up research (hey google, how you doin’?) they realized a lot of the symptoms described feel too soul-achingly familiar to be coincidence.
These mothers come to the internet seeking validation and support because they are having a disproportionately hard time with parenting, and are struggling to navigate the treacherous and heretofore uncharted coastline of disability, both their children’s and their own.
These women have always struggled with organization, with emotional and sensory sensitivity, with abysmal self esteem, complex trauma, difficulty with addiction, abuse, and managing money (just a few well-researched impacts of undiagnosed ADHD in adults; French et al., 2023).
Then they became parents and found that the pressures of motherhood trigger all the shame inside them that they’ve been carrying alone.
Over time, they’ve developed (often unhealthy) coping mechanisms so they could function on a basic level, or at least hide enough of their dysfunction to survive, and they’ve shielded themselves with a mask of people-pleasing and over-achieving, just to conceal the truth that they always knew – that they are different. That methods geared toward NT people don’t work for them.
And then hover a magnifying glass over that. The scrutinizing lens of parenthood casts a burning spot of pure sunlight onto their carefully constructed paper armor, which has already been weakened by sleeplessness, dwindling time to themselves, the clutter of childhood that seeps in through their pores and infects their minds, and the non-stop noise and demands of kids. Combustion is inevitable.
(Ok, I know, parenting is fucking hard for everyone. It just is. If you feel attacked by the idea that ND parents of ND kids have it harder, then this is not the place for you. Kindly move along.)
A Deluge of Advice that Doesn’t Work for ND Parents
So what are we telling these mothers, these women who are just trying to survive till school goes back in? These parents who have tried everything to maintain some sense of order and sanity in their already chaotic lives? How are they supposed to divide up their duties and their time in a way that prevents total annihilation of an already-tenuous household balance?
Try a chore chart. And a schedule. Kids need structure.
A fucking chore chart. Are you kidding me?
Looking back, did I embrace the rigorous scheduling that my parents, the school, and even workplaces in my adulthood set for me, the careful and methodical enumeration of tasks (read: demands) on my time? Or did I strain ineffectively against them with every thread of sinew in my body until I snapped?
I bet you can guess the answer to that question. No googling required.
And how do those same organizational methods make me feel today?
The answer is: Pretty Shit. Rigorously imposed organizational structures make me feel Pretty Shit.
Turns out, being the one who has to design, maintain, and enforce the calendar is just as soul-melting as being the one expected to follow it.
Shocker, I know.
So no. That’s not going to work in my household.
Not that I haven’t tried, mind you.
The self loathing fills me little by little until I feel like an over-ripe fruit. If you touch me, my skin will split open and maggots will come pouring out. Please don’t touch me.
I’ve tried all manner of things that promise to bring relief to stressed out parents.
I’ve tried gentle parenting, playfulness, collaborative problem solving, therapy therapy therapy. Read the book, do the worksheets, apply the techniques, review, take a parenting class, go back to therapy, re-take the parenting class because you must have missed something, read another book, adjust the meds, try again.
And the only thing that’s been constant, in the twelve years since I first became a mother, is guilt.
Oh my fucking lord, the guilt never eases.
There’s guilt over never having been enough, never having been able to do enough.
Or maybe it’s guilt over being too much, and trying to do too much, in order to prove your worth as a person, to prove that you’re not just lazy, just careless, just weird and spacey and squandering all your potential.
Probably both.
Too much and not enough at the same time. What a mind fuck is that?
To fight against the parts of your identity that were deemed unacceptable your whole life takes constant effort. All the stress of striving inevitably leads to burnout and you collapse in a heap of burning wreckage or cease to function altogether. Then there’s the guilt over that too.
Like many ND people, trying to figure out why I am the way I am has been a lifelong pursuit. Incidentally, this is why so many of us enjoy astrology or Myers-Briggs personality tests or repeatedly doing the online quiz to see what your patronus would be (before you found out that JKR is a terf – see above re: overlap between ND and Queer communities).
Through the process of all this self-critical examination, trying to fit into boxes just to feel like we belong somewhere, we lose sight of who we actually are. In fact, a blurry sense of identity is a common side effect of ND masking, and can take years and years to unravel (for more about ND masking, see Miller et al., 2020).
Sorry, but my kids don’t have time for all that navel gazing. They’re growing up too fast as it is.
There’s so much guilt around not meeting expectations of motherhood, and we carry it alone, because we wouldn’t dream to impose our absurdly high standards for ourselves on anyone else, especially not our partner, who already has to put up with so much from us, who would probably have left us a long time ago if they knew what sort of shitshow we would become.
There’s the guilt of being seen as different, of being known for the dumpster fire that we are. A lot of us don’t have a village to help up bear the weight of all that guilt and self-loathing, which in turn only causes us to push people away, to isolate further.
The self loathing fills me little by little until I feel like an over-ripe fruit. If you touch me, my skin will split open and maggots will come pouring out. Please don’t touch me.
We have plenty of studies showing that isolation is incredibly harmful to mothers of young children (Taylor et al., 2021). And thanks to COVID, we even have a few recent ones on the impacts isolation has on ND people (i.e. Remington et al., 2022). But as far as I know, we haven’t yet built a usable bridge between the two.
There’s guilt from trying to bottle up your unconventional interests and intensity, all the things that you allow yourself to secretly hope are what actually make you amazing, but have caused you nothing but ridicule from peers and parents and teachers. And then, like a shaken can of Coke, it all comes fizzing out of you, another sign of your failure, and the resulting mess confirms that you are unlovable, unworthy of love.
The Perilous Balance Between Love and Guilt
Love as a parent is a whole other level. Because here is this precious thing that grows inside you, and you want to nurture it with everything that you are, but you’ve learned from experience, repeated over and over, that uncritical, gentle, accepting love isn’t meant for you. So when it’s time to give that sort of love to your kids, you don’t even know what it feels like.
Now, hold up. I am not saying that ND parents can’t love. I’m not saying we can’t feel deep empathy for our children. Because we do, and that’s part of the problem. We see so much of our own struggles in them and want to protect them from having to hurt like we do. We desperately long to reassure them that they are loveable and worthy and all the things we’ve come to believe are impossible for ourselves. You’re beginning to see the disconnect now, yeah?
And you’re responsible for these small humans you created, that you love so fucking much, of course you do, but you also sort of hate them a lot of the time, and lo and behold, you’re fucking failing. Again.
But this time, it’s not just you who has to wear the consequences of your failure. You’re used to the soft weight of it. You’re even used to its wet-wool smell. After all, it’s a garment that’s been tailored to you over all the years of your life. But now your kids are rustling through your closet and trying on your things, and they’ve put it on, the sleeves of your lifelong failure dangling limply past their hands like deflated tentacles. It’s too big for them now, but they’ll grow into it. They are growing up so fast. And they look to you all gleamy-eyed and you try not to choke, to retch, because it’s like looking in a mirror.
It’s not just that you’re failing now. You could handle that, you always have. But it’s so much worse. You’re failing THEM.
It causes such a deep and inescapable ache that you are overwhelmed by the awful realization that perhaps you never should have had children at all. That it was a terrible mistake, subjecting them to your faulty brain-genes and simultaneously subjecting yourself to an endless torrent of sensory overwhelm and crippling self-doubt.
There’s a sneaky paradox that lives inside that thought, though, because you may never have asked “could I be ND?” if not for your own child’s diagnosis. You may never have learned how truly unfit you are to parenting without becoming a parent. Thus the demon ouroboros makes a meal of its own inky tail.
I want to be the parent I needed as a kid. I even have a pretty good idea of what that could look like. I mean, it’s not for lack of trying, right? But being ND is a life-long lesson in the non-linear mathematics of effort does not equal outcome.
It’s no surprise then that ND people are extremely likely to present with co-morbid anxiety and depression (Accardo et al., 2022). In fact, women are much more likely to have been diagnosed as anxious or depressed well before an ADHD or autism diagnosis was even considered. It’s the default medical response to prescribe antidepressants to a struggling female rather than question her neurotype.
I’m not saying that antidepressants aren’t a valid and necessary treatment option. Fuck, I’ve been taking them for about a decade myself. However, it’s the reductive thinking that the cause of women’s woes are emotional imbalances rather than those emotional imbalances being a symptom of a deeper, structural issue that can be harmful.
Many ND women can paddle their way into adulthood just barely keeping their heads above water until the added weight of motherhood drags them under, so of course their doctors put “post natal” in front of their depression/anxiety diagnosis and leave it there. Case closed. No further investigation required.
The deep work of ND motherhood
The kids are taking turns with their unending series of thankless demands today. It’s a non-stop tag-team sensory nightmare, and I am the unwilling captain of this garbage barge. There’s been name calling, violence, a blatant disregard for instructions, pleas, and outright bribery. There is no end to the screaming, and I can feel the staff of my internal flight deck counting down the launch time to my own meltdown.
I want to be the parent I needed as a kid. I even have a pretty good idea of what that could look like. I mean, it’s not for lack of trying, right? But being ND is a life-long lesson in the non-linear mathematics of effort does not equal outcome. And through it all, I still don’t know how to overcome the piles of deadfall, of broken branches, winter-dry and tangled, between the person I am and the person I know I need to be for my kids.
The problem is, I can know everything there is to know about developmentally appropriate expectations and creating secure attachments, and the talking so kids will listen and listening so kids will talk (another excellent parenting book. Seriously), but at the end of the day, it’s just not possible when you live from moment to moment trembling on the edge of collapse.
There’s a huge gap between knowing better and doing better.
And that gap feels like a knife between the ribs.
Between the knowing and the doing is learning HOW.
And perfect honesty here, I have no answers.
Or actually, I have a lot of answers. A whole internet full of answers. I just don’t know how they’re supposed to work for a ND mother like me.
Maybe there is no answer to the question of how to be an ND parent with ND kids. Maybe that’s why there’s nothing on the internet to provide any insight, any relief. Because there is none to have.
There are more and more of us out there, ND mums of ND kids, lurking in the corners of the internet seeking solace. There’s a vibrant community on social media, women who attempt to prop each other up, even as we tumble deeper into despair.
We are not ok.
Maybe we need to complain louder? If so, consider this a call to arms.
We will flap our hands in a most unacceptable manner, and shout creatively-phrased strings of expletives until we are provided support that accounts for the cumulative effect of multiple ND people in a household. We will insist on support that treats ND families as dynamic systems instead of targeting individuals for intervention on a case-by-case basis (and only when you’ve tried all the NT advice first, and found that it leads to nothing but crisis.)
We will keep googling until the algorithms recognize that we exist, that our voices matter, that our struggles are relevant. That we are not alone.
But seriously. If anyone finds the silver bullet, you will let me know, won’t you?
References
Accardo, A. L., Pontes, N. M. H., & Pontes, M. C. F. (2022) Heightened Anxiety and Depression Among Autistic Adolescents with ADHD: Findings From the National Survey of Children’s Health 2016-2019. J Autism Dev Disord. 3:1–14. doi: 10.1007/s10803-022-05803-9
Baxter, J. (2021). Towards COVID normal: Sharing of housework in couple families. (Families in Australia Survey report). Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies.
Boseley, M. (2023). The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD. Penguin Random House Australia.
Callahan, L. F. (2021) Motherhood and the Moral Load. Think. 20(58), 55-68. doi:10.1017/S1477175621000051
Faraone, S.V., & Larsson, H. (2019) Genetics of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Mol Psychiatry 24, 562–575. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-018-0070-0
French, B., Daley, D., Groom, M., & Cassidy, S. (2023) Risks Associated With Undiagnosed ADHD and/or Autism: A Mixed-Method Systematic Review. J Atten Disord. 27(12), 1393-1410. doi: 10.1177/10870547231176862
Grace, K., Remington, A., Lloyd-Evans, B., Davies, J., & Crane, L. (2022). Loneliness in autistic adults: A systematic review. Autism, 26(8), 2117-2135. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221077721
Greene, R. W. (1998) The Explosive Child: A new approach for understanding and parenting easily frustrated, chronically inflexible children (6th edition). HarperCollins.
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., & Mandy, W. (2020) The Female Autism Phenotype and Camouflaging: a Narrative Review. Rev J Autism Dev Disord. 7, 306–317. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40489-020-00197-9
Miller, D., Rees, J., & Pearson, A. (2021) “Masking Is Life”: Experiences of Masking in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults. Autism Adulthood. 3(4), 330-338. doi: 10.1089/aut.2020.0083
McCrossin, R. (2022) Finding the True Number of Females with Autistic Spectrum Disorder by Estimating the Biases in Initial Recognition and Clinical Diagnosis. Children (Basel). 9(2), 272. doi: 10.3390/children9020272
Offer, S., & Schneider, B. (2011). Revisiting the Gender Gap in Time-Use Patterns: Multitasking and Well-Being among Mothers and Fathers in Dual-Earner Families. American Sociological Review, 76(6), 809-833. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122411425170
Quadt, L., Williams, G., Mulcahy, J., Larsson, D. E. O., Silva, M., Arnold, A. J., Critchley, H. D., & Garfinkel, S. N. (2023) “I’m Trying to Reach Out, I’m Trying to Find My People”: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of the Link Between Sensory Differences, Loneliness, and Mental Health in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults. Autism in Adulthood. http://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2022.0062
Quinn, P. O., & Madhoo, M. (2014) A review of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in women and girls: uncovering this hidden diagnosis. Prim Care Companion CNS Disord. 16(3). doi: 10.4088/PCC.13r01596
Sandin, S., Lichtenstein, P., Kuja-Halkola, R., Hultman, C., Larsson, H., & Reichenberg, A. (2017) The Heritability of Autism Spectrum Disorder. JAMA. 318(12), 1182-1184. doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.12141
Taylor, B. L., Howard, L. M., Jackson, K., Johnson, S., Mantovani, N., Nath, S., Sokolova, A. Y., & Sweeney, A. (2021) Mums Alone: Exploring the Role of Isolation and Loneliness in the Narratives of Women Diagnosed with Perinatal Depression. J Clin Med. 10(11), 2271. doi: 10.3390/jcm10112271
Young, S., Adamo, N., Ásgeirsdóttir, B. B., Branney, P., Beckett, M., Colley, W., Cubbin, S., Deeley, Q., Farrag, E., Gudjonsson, G., Hill, P., Hollingdale, J., Kilic, O., Lloyd, T., Mason, P., Paliokosta, E., Perecherla, S., Sedgwick, J., Skirrow, C., Tierney, K., van Rensburg, K., & Woodhouse, E. (2020) Females with ADHD: An expert consensus statement taking a lifespan approach providing guidance for the identification and treatment of attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder in girls and women. BMC Psychiatry. 20(1), 404. doi: 10.1186/s12888-020-02707-9