The gap between knowing and doing contains more information than I realised.

I know that going to bed earlier would make tomorrow easier.

I know that if I put something immediately into my calendar, there is a significantly greater chance that Future Marta will remember it exists.

I know that preparing food ahead of time makes the rest of my week calmer.

I know that I feel better after I exercise.

I know that opening the document is usually the hardest part.

I know all of this and I also know that knowing it has, on many occasions, made absolutely no difference whatsoever.

There is something particularly irritating about watching yourself repeatedly fail to do something you know would help you. It would almost be easier if the problem were a lack of information. Then I could read a book, listen to a podcast, ask someone clever, perhaps spend three unnecessary hours researching the subject and emerge triumphantly with The Answer.

Knowledge has always been comfortable territory for me.

The problem is that I quite often already have the answer but I just haven’t done the thing.

I’ve been thinking recently about when I first started questioning our obsession with knowing the right thing to do, and I think it began long before I knew anything about executive function or had any idea that I had ADHD.

It started when I had a baby.

When my oldest was born, I was inundated with information. The shoulds arrived thick and fast and from everywhere.

He should sleep here.

He shouldn’t sleep there.

Feed him like this.

Don’t feed him like that.

Pick him up.

Don’t pick him up too much.

Get him into a routine.

Follow his cues.

Let him sleep.

Wake him up.

The mind boggling thing was that much of this very confidently delivered advice directly contradicted the equally confidently delivered advice I’d received five minutes earlier.

I was a new mother, exhausted, trying desperately to do a good job and increasingly convinced that everyone else had been given access to some parenting manual that I had been returned to sender before I set eyes on it.

I was completely confused but my baby wasn’t.

He was actually giving me quite a lot of information, and the shoulds were blocking the view.

Slowly, I started paying more attention to him and less attention to the enormous chorus of people telling me what babies were supposed to need.

I began wondering how much of what we do to babies happens because we’ve carefully considered the particular human in front of us and how much happens because this is what you do with babies.

I didn’t have language for it then and I certainly wasn’t thinking about human variability. I was simply beginning to suspect that advice might be more useful when treated as something to experiment with rather than something to obey.

Then, less than two years later, I had another baby and he made the point considerably clearer.

My first child loved being sung to.

I could sing to him and watch his body settle until eventually he fell asleep.

Excellent, I thought.

Apparently I know how to put children to sleep.

Then his brother arrived and I sang to him.

He communicated, in whatever vocabulary was available to him at the time, that I could essentially fuck off.

Reading produced the opposite result. Reading before bed could wind my oldest up. His brain seemed to grab onto the story and become more awake.

His younger brother needed it. A book slowed him down. Listening settled him. It became part of how he transitioned towards sleep.

Same parents. Same home. Two little boys separated by less than two years.

Completely different nervous systems.

I think that was when something became permanent in the way I thought about people.

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Knowing what works isn’t enough. We have to ask who it works for.

That question has followed me ever since.

Into teaching. Into ADHD coaching. Into parenting teenagers.

And eventually, back towards myself.

We are very fond of giving people more information. We do this everywhere and all the time. Sometimes with the best of intentions.

A child isn’t completing their homework, so we remind them why homework matters.

Someone wants to exercise, so we explain the benefits of exercise.

We want to spend less money, so we make a budget.

We want to eat differently, so we learn about nutrition.

Information has its place because sometimes we genuinely don’t know what to do.

But there is another category of problem that fascinates me much more:

I know exactly what to do and I’m still not doing it.

Because once we know that humans vary, that same behaviour starts to look much more interesting.

The question isn’t simply:

What should this person do? or How can this person try harder?

I want to know:

What is happening for this particular person, in this particular environment, at this particular moment, that is making the thing difficult to do?

Or, more succintly:

Where did the friction begin?

This is a much more interesting question.

It turns the moment into something I can investigate rather than something I have to defend.

Let’s take exercise.

There are days when I know I want to go to the gym and don’t want to go to the gym at exactly the same time.

The knowledge isn’t missing. The time is the same every morning. I could probably give you a fairly convincing presentation on the benefits of strength training.

So where is the friction?

Maybe I slept badly.

Maybe, because I slept badly, I convinced myself that i can leave it until the end of a long day and now I’m asking a depleted brain to initiate something effortful.

Maybe I haven’t decided what I’m doing when I get there.

Maybe the clothes I want are in the laundry.

Maybe I’m overwhelmed by something completely unrelated and the gym has simply become one decision too many.

Maybe I’m bored with my programme.

Maybe I need someone else there.

Or perhaps I genuinely need to rest.

Those are seven different problems hiding underneath the same visible behaviour:

I didn’t exercise.

And each one requires a different response.

“Try harder” isn’t particularly useful for any of them.

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This is especially interesting with ADHD

One of the things ADHD has forced me to understand is that having a skill and being able to reliably access that skill are not the same thing.

I can be extraordinarily organized and

I can also lose the thing that was in my hand approximately thirty seconds ago.

I can design an excellent system and

I can forget the system exists.

I can understand exactly how to break a large project into manageable steps and

then spend an impressive amount of time avoiding Step One.

This inconsistency used to bother me enormously because I thought competence should be reproducible.

If I could do something yesterday, surely I should be able to do it today.

However human brains, inconveniently, are not vending machines.

Attention changes.

Energy changes.

Interest changes.

Emotion changes.

The environment changes.

The demands competing for our cognitive resources change on the regular.

With ADHD, those fluctuations can be particularly visible, but I don’t think the question belongs only to ADHD brains.

All humans experience a gap between intention and action and perhaps some of us simply spend more time living there.

I see it differently in my children now

This shift continues to change the way I think about parenting.

When one of my children doesn’t do something we’ve discussed repeatedly, there is an enormous temptation to think:

He knows this.

And he probably does but I’ve realized how little that tells me.

Knowing that an assignment is due on Friday doesn’t mean you have accurately estimated how long it will take.

Knowing you need your sports kit tomorrow doesn’t mean the thought will conveniently appear while you’re standing beside the sports kit.

Knowing that starting earlier would reduce your stress doesn’t necessarily make starting feel any easier.

Knowing how to organize yourself doesn’t guarantee access to that organization at 7pm after a full day of school.

This matters to me more and more as my children get older because I don’t want to become the person who permanently closes the gap for them.

I also don’t want to stand on the other side shouting information they already possess.

I want them to become curious about their own friction.

Where did this fall apart?

What were you expecting yourself to remember?

Did you know where to start?

Was the task clear?

Did you underestimate the time?

Were you avoiding something uncomfortable?

What would make this easier next time?

That feels much closer to learning and sometimes the answer is embarrassingly small.

Once I stop treating the problem as a failure of character, the solution is often incredibly mundane.

Move the charger.

Set the reminder.

Put the shoes by the door.

Open the document before lunch.

Ask someone to sit beside you.

Decide what you’re cooking before you’re hungry.

Put the medication beside something you already use every morning.

Make the first step smaller.

Remove one decision.

Do it at a different time.

Some of these interventions are so unimpressive that they barely qualify as self-improvement and I love them for precisely that reason.

I am less interested in proving that I can overcome friction and much more interested in designing some of it out. The less friction in my life, the better.

Of course, sometimes I simply don’t want to do it

There is a danger here of turning every moment of procrastination into an elaborate investigation of the human psyche.

Sometimes I haven’t done the thing because I don’t care for doing the thing.

Sometimes the answer to Where did the friction begin? is:

The task is boring and I would rather watch psychotherapists analyze the patriarchy playing out in real time on men’s first dates.

Fair.

Understanding the friction doesn’t absolve me of responsibility.

The email may still need answering.

The form may still need submitting.

My children don’t get to announce that unloading the dishwasher is incompatible with their nervous systems and wander away.

There are things we have to do because they are part of participating in a family, doing our jobs, caring for ourselves and generally being humans who live among other humans.

But even then, curiosity gives me somewhere useful to go.

If this task genuinely needs doing and my brain repeatedly resists it, how am I going to get myself across the gap?

That question gives me something to work with. Shame rarely does.

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This week’s experiment

I’m testing that gap. Between knowing and doing. The friction.

Whenever I catch myself thinking:

I know I should...

I’m going to pay attention to what comes next.

I know I should, but...

I know what would help, but...

I’ve already decided to, but...

Somewhere after that but is probably a piece of information.

Maybe the system doesn’t fit.

Maybe I’m asking too much of my memory.

Maybe I’ve designed for energy I don’t currently have.

Maybe there are too many steps.

Maybe the reward is too distant.

Maybe I’m anxious.

Maybe I need support.

Maybe I need to do something I don’t particularly want to do anyway.

I won’t know until I look and I think that’s the shift I want to hang out in for a while.

I spent a long time trying to become the sort of person who simply did what she knew was good for her. It cost me.

Now I’m more curious about the person who actually exists authentically.

She is inconsistent. She gets tired. She becomes fascinated by things at deeply inconvenient times. She can be disciplined and impulsive, organized and chaotic, capable and completely unable to find her glasses. A walking, breathing, living oxymoron if you will.

She’s also the person I have to design the system for.

So perhaps the next time we know exactly what would help and find ourselves inexplicably doing something else, we don’t need another lecture about what we should be doing.

We might need to get curious.

Where did the friction begin?

There is probably something useful waiting there for us to uncover.

Question the default.
Keep what works.
Design the rest.

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This would be less interesting if he didn’t read, but he does. A lot.

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This summer he has read Sapiens, Prisoners of Geography, The Righteous Mind and The Boys in the Boat. He has now picked up Homo Deus voluntarily, which is perhaps not what most people imagine when they think about a teenager who struggles academically.

Give him history, geography, psychology, human behaviour, sport, big ideas and information that can be squirrelled away somewhere in his brain and he is interested. He reads quickly, remembers an extraordinary amount and will casually retrieve something months later that I have absolutely no recollection of him ever telling me.

Give him A Gentleman in Moscow, however, and apparently we have reached an impasse.

I have been paying attention to all of this because in just two days he will begin one of the most academically demanding periods of his school life, and I have been thinking a lot about what it actually means to prepare him for it. As his parent, not his educator.

I could have spent the summer trying to get him ahead.

I could have found the syllabi, introduced essay structures, practised writing, organised folders, created study schedules and began building the elaborate scaffolding that my educator brain is extremely capable of building.

I could probably have the whole thing colour coded by lunchtime. If you know me, you know I love a good color coded system.

But I’m trying very hard to resist.

Because, just like I do with the students at school, before I start designing support, in this case, for the IB Diploma, I want to understand the person who is actually going to do it.

His educational psychological assessment gave us a map.

One of the most useful pieces of information in report was the contrast between two areas of his learning.

Reading is a strength. In Grade 7 he was reading at Grade 12 level.

Writing is an area for growth. In Grade 7 he was writing at a Grade 2 average.

On paper, that looks relatively straightforward but in real life, I think it must sometimes be incredibly frustrating for him.

He can read complex material and retain it. He can talk about ideas, make connections and pull information from things he read months ago. There is a lot going on in his head.

But then he has to get it onto paper and suddenly, knowing something isn’t enough.

He has to hold the question in his mind, decide what matters, organise his thoughts, sequence them, find the language to communicate them and keep track of where he is going while he writes, all while managing thoughts popping into his head that he found interesting from what he read while filtering through the lens of relevance.

There is a considerable distance between I understand this and I can show you that I understand this in the format you require.

That distance matters so much. Throughout middle school and the first half of high school his report card usually read “…lacks depth and complexity…” but if he could talk his way through his assessment, the ending would be different.

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His Higher Level subjects are Psychology, Sports Science and History. At Standard Level he has opted for Math AI, Spanish Ab Initio and English Literature.

He has chosen subjects that make complete sense for him. They sit around things he is interested in: people, behaviour, sport, history, ideas, and that was the goal seeing he does not know what he wants to study later in life yet.

But these subjects will also ask so much of him as a writer.

My first instinct, both as his mother and as an educator, could therefore be to look directly at the weaker area and get to work. Writing is difficult, so we practise writing.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

I just wonder whether we sometimes start at the wrong end.

What if we begin where learning already works? Where it is strong and

For now, we are reading.

Actually, he is reading. That’s an important distinction.

There are no comprehension questions waiting at the end. There is no summer reading spreadsheet lurking in Google Drive.

He is choosing books and consuming ideas.

And when I look at what he has gravitated towards, I can already see threads running into the subjects he is about to study.

Prisoners of Geography gives him another way of thinking about power, conflict and history.

The Righteous Mind asks questions about morality, belief, group identity and why intelligent people can look at the same world and interpret it completely differently.

Sapiens and Homo Deus wander through human history, society, behaviour, technology and our stories about ourselves.

The Boys in the Boat brings together sport, performance, teamwork, history and human resilience.

None of these books were chosen because they appear on an IB reading list.

I have no idea whether a single sentence from any of them will ever make its way into an assessment but that isn’t really the point.

What interests me is what happens when someone begins learning something new and already has places, connections and a foundation for the information to land.

A new idea in Psychology may connect with something he encountered in Haidt.

A History discussion may bump into something he remembers from Marshall.

Something in Sports Science may make him reconsider an idea from The Boys in the Boat.

He is building background knowledge without calling it background knowledge and because reading is already a place where he experiences competence, there is very little friction involved.

I think that feels worth protecting.

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Where I probably have to watch myself most carefully is in turning a passion into an intervention.

I am a teacher. I’m going into my 22nd year in education.

Give me a child happily reading a book and approximately twelve seconds later I can think of seventeen excellent learning opportunities to accompany it.

What if he writes a reflection?

What if we practise a paragraph?

What if I give him a prompt?

What if we make connections to the IB?

What if I take this perfectly lovely thing he is doing voluntarily and suck every last drop of joy out of it in the name of preparation?

So I’m trying something different instead.

We talk. He tells me his thoughts. We disagree about ideas.

He explains something he has read over dinner and I ask questions because I am genuinely interested.

That oral processing matters because the thoughts are already there. We can hear them before asking him to capture them.

Eventually, I do want to experiment with building a bridge between the two.

Perhaps he talks through an idea first and then writes it.

Perhaps we take something he has explained beautifully out loud and ask what the same thinking would look like in three strong sentences.

Perhaps we practise a claim, some evidence and an explanation using content he already understands rather than asking his brain to grapple with unfamiliar content and the demands of writing at the same time.

Small bridges.

I don’t want every book to become academic currency. I do want him to be a lifelong reader.

If reading is one of the places where his brain currently says, I can do this, I want to be very careful about what I build on top of it.

Which brings me back to the count. A Gentleman in Moscow is still sitting there.

I find that almost as useful as all the books he has finished.

Because “reading is a strength” doesn’t mean all reading is equally easy.

A beautifully written, character-driven novel is asking something different of him from a nonfiction book filled with arguments, facts and ideas.

Perhaps the pace isn’t working for him.

Perhaps fiction requires a different kind of sustained attention.

Perhaps he finds information inherently rewarding in a way that narrative isn’t.

Perhaps this particular book simply isn’t for him.

I don’t know yet.

And I’m trying to become more comfortable with not immediately knowing.

One of the distinctions I want us both to get better at making over the next two years is the difference between:

I can’t do this.

I can’t do this yet.

I can do this, but it costs me a lot.

and

I really don’t want to do this.

From the outside, those can look remarkably similar.

For the person experiencing them, they are completely different pieces of information.

The IB is his experiment. Parenting him through it is mine.

I know some of what is coming. There will be deadlines. Long-term projects. Competing priorities. Large amounts of reading and a lot of writing.

There will be weeks when several subjects apparently conspire to require everything at once and underneath the academic content will be the executive-function demands that don’t appear neatly on a syllabus: planning backwards, estimating time, initiating work, remembering what needs to happen, deciding what matters first, switching between tasks and continuing to work when the interesting part has long since disappeared.

ADHD will be in the room for all of it.

So will being sixteen and this second part matters enormously to me.

I want him to work hard and discover what he is capable of academically, but I also want him to play tennis, see his friends, go out, have girlfriends, stay up occasionally doing something ridiculous, sleep enough most of the time and spend hours doing things that contribute absolutely nothing to his university application.

I want there to be enough of him left over for his actual life.

Which means I am going to have to learn when to help and when to move out of the way.

When to remind. When to ask. When to help him design a system. When to let a system fail.

And, probably hardest of all, when to watch him make a decision that I can already see is going to make Thursday considerably more unpleasant and allow Thursday to arrive anyway because I don’t want to become the executive function he rents for two years.

I want him to leave school understanding how to support his own.

I don’t know whether this approach will work and that’s partly why I want to document it. I have another son who will probably run the same course in two years time.

So, over this time, I want to write about what we try, what helps, what doesn’t, where I overstep, where I should probably have stepped in sooner and how the balance between support and independence shifts as he gets older.

For now, I have an educational psychology report that tells us something useful about how he learns. I have a teenager whose brain absorbs an extraordinary amount through reading. I have a pile of books disappearing steadily beside his bed. And I have one stubborn Russian count who appears to be going nowhere.

That’s enough information to begin.

When I imagine looking back at these two years, I hope success is difficult to capture in a single number, because success is multifaceted.

Of course I want him to get results that reflect his ability and effort butI also want him to know himself better.

I want him to recognise where his brain works beautifully and where he needs to build support around it. I want him to know how to ask for help without believing that needing help makes him less capable, and how to create systems without assuming that every system has to look like everybody else’s.

Most of all, I want him to reach eighteen with ownership of his learning increasingly in his hands.

Perhaps preparing him for the IB isn’t really about making him better at school before he starts.

Perhaps our first job is simply to pay close enough attention to the learner who is already here.

Question the default. Keep what works. Design the rest.

Last year, I built something that made sense to me.

ADHD Untangled gave me somewhere to put everything I was learning about ADHD. As a parent, as an educator, as a coach and as an adult who came to understand her own brain much later than she probably would have liked.

I wrote about executive function and nervous systems. I wrote about parenting and emotional regulation. I wrote about the invisible work of living with ADHD.

It made sense and it still makes sense.

And yet, for a while now, I’ve felt myself pushing against the edges of it.

I kept having ideas I wanted to write about and then wondering whether they belonged here.

I wanted to write about the systems I build for myself.

About AI, about education, about money, fitness, about parenting teenagers and the strange negotiation between supporting them and getting out of their way.

My oldest is about to begin the IB Diploma and I want to document what it looks like to support an ADHD teenager through something academically demanding while remembering that success at sixteen also looks like friendships, sport, girlfriends, sleep, independence, terrible decisions in a safe environment, good decisions and having enough time to actually be sixteen.

I want to write about psychology and human behaviour.

I want to tell you about something I tried for seven days because I wondered whether it might make my life easier.

I want to talk about money and health and homes and learning and the completely unnecessary systems I have probably spent far too long designing.

And every time, I found myself asking:

Does this belong on an ADHD Substack?

Eventually I became more interested in that question than the answer because I realized I was doing something I spend an enormous amount of time encouraging other people to stop doing.

I was trying to fit myself into the system I had created.

ADHD Untangled wasn’t a mistake.

I need to say that because I think we have a tendency to look backwards whenever we change direction and decide the previous version must somehow have been wrong and I don’t feel that way about this.

This publication was bigger than me when I built it.

It gave me somewhere to explore ADHD and parenting at a time when those were the questions occupying enormous amounts of space in my life.

I learned here, I met people here, I wrote things I’m proud of here and I changed here.

The questions got bigger so perhaps the container should be allowed to get bigger here too.

I’m a big picture thinker and oftentimes think abstractly and conceptually, and I kept zooming out of the ADHD lens wondering where it would take me.

There is an idea underneath, or above almost everything I’m interested in that I hadn’t quite been able to articulate before.

What happens when we stop expecting people to fit the system and start designing systems around people?

Once I saw it, I started seeing it everywhere.

It’s there when I think about ADHD.

It’s there when I think about education and learner variability.

It’s there when I’m parenting teenagers and trying to work out whether a system that worked beautifully when they were twelve has any business still existing at sixteen.

It’s there when I look at my own life and wonder why I’m stressing about a traditional Christmas instead of lying on the beach in Thailand drinking a frozen watermelon juice.

Sometimes the answer is perfectly reasonable.

Sometimes the answer appears to be:

Because that’s how I’ve always done it.

Which, increasingly

isn’t

enough

for

me.

I’m 44 and I’ve had enough.

So I’m going to experiment

ADHD Untangled is becoming Design the Rest.

ADHD will still be here.

I have ADHD. I parent ADHD children. I coach around ADHD. I teach children whose brains vary enormously. It would be fairly difficult to remove ADHD from my thinking even if I wanted to.

But now it gets to be a lens rather than a boundary.

Design the Rest gives me somewhere to explore the bigger question.

I want to experiment with how we build lives around the people actually living them.

Sometimes I’ll bring research, sometimes I’ll bring something I’ve tried, sometimes I’ll bring a conversation I’ve had with one of my children that has completely rearranged something in my brain.

Sometimes I suspect I’ll arrive with a half-formed thought and we’ll figure out what I think about it together.

I want to document more and prescribe less.

I want to stay curious.

I want this little corner of the internet to have room to breathe.

Which brings me to you

There are 317 of you here as I write this.

Some of you came for ADHD parenting.

Some came because you have ADHD yourself.

Some of you are educators.

Some of you may have read one article six months ago and completely forgotten you subscribed. In which case, hello again!

I don’t know whether all 317 of you will want to come where I’m going.

And that’s okay. Please know that I highly value the unsubscribe button for when things no longer add value to your life.

But…

if you’ve ever wondered whether something in your life could work differently, I think there will be something here for you.

Maybe you’ve inherited a way of parenting that doesn’t fit your family.

Maybe the productivity system everyone swears by makes your brain want to crawl out of your skull.

Maybe you’re entering a different stage of life and noticing that some of the things you’ve been carrying no longer belong to you.

Or perhaps you’re simply curious.

That’s enough.

Because this isn’t really a story about changing the name of a Substack.

It’s about noticing when something that once worked for you has become a little too small and giving yourself permission to make more room.

I think that’s an experiment worth trying.

Question the default. Keep what works.Design the rest.

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I keep coming back to one question:

What happens when we stop expecting people to fit the system and start designing systems around people?

That’s what I am exploring here.

Through ADHD. Parenting teenagers in high school. Learning, Psychology, AI, Learning. Small experiments in my own life that make me wonder whether there might be another way.

I write about what I am trying, what I am learning, what doesn’t work and what I haven’t figured out yet.

If you’re curious about questioning some of the defaults you’ve inherited and designing something that fits you a little better, you’re very welcome here.

Question the default.

Keep what works.

Design the rest.

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Most of those thoughts lean towards creative pursuits. I’ll have an idea that feels genuinely exciting, something I think could make life easier for other people. Then, almost as quickly, it’s interrupted by the reminder that we’re out of milk or that I still haven’t replied to that email.

The creative wondering drifts into the mist.

Forgotten.

Sometimes I laugh because, in the moment, it really did feel like the idea that was going to change everything.

Other times, it’s less amusing.

Forgetting the little things chips away at my trust in myself. Promises slip. Tasks disappear. Every forgotten thought quietly reinforces the story that I’m unreliable.

For many years, I’ve chased a more mindful life.

Calm. Breathable peace.

Meditation, yoga and therapy have all played a part. They have also helped me recognize the obstacles that make mindfulness difficult to reach.

This week’s experiment was intentional: I wanted to find one consistent place to capture information.

There are so many thoughts, feelings and magical moments passing through my mind that my brain simply can’t keep track of them all.

I wear a lot of hats.

Each one seems to have its own stream of ideas, quietly puffing away like little chimneys. Individually, they don’t feel like much. Together, they become surprisingly noisy.

I needed a practical way to manage those thoughts.

Part of me began wondering whether mindfulness depended on more than meditation or slowing down. Perhaps it was also connected to how much I was asking my brain and body to carry.

Could creating a physical place for my thoughts make more space for calm?

Recently, I’ve been asking AI the same prompt each day:

How are we designing life today?

Over the past week, each response brought me a little closer to moving thoughts out of my head and giving them an organized place to rest. I pictured the Hall of Prophecy in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where every prophecy is held safely inside its own glass sphere.

Most of the suggestions were simple. The first was to choose one place to capture information and I chose to use Apple Notes.

Until then, I had been adding things to Apple Notes, pen and paper, Notion, my calendar and my email.

My thoughts were scattered inside my head, and my systems were scattered too.

It wasn’t helping me in my quest for mindfulness.

Some of the results surprised me.

I wrote a couple of things in my notes, and when my reminder pinged later, I couldn’t quite remember what one of them meant.

I expected to feel frustrated.

Instead, I felt calm.

Free.

Lifted.

I hadn’t realised how heavy some thoughts had become until they stopped asking me to carry them.

I began to wonder whether forgetting was always such a bad thing.

By the end of the week, I had created a personalised system for the to-dos, ideas and thoughts that usually raced around my head.

I felt more open. I had more capacity.

I was more receptive to the life happening around me, and some of the tension I had been carrying in my body began to release.

I’ve been wondering whether the tension of everyday life settles somewhere in our bodies.

And whether, sometimes, the first step towards mindfulness isn’t another meditation or breathing exercise.

Perhaps it’s giving our thoughts somewhere else to rest.

Question the default. Keep what works. Design the rest.

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Maybe it’s replying to an email.
Maybe it’s organising the school forms that have been floating around the kitchen counter for three days.
Maybe it’s starting the project you’ve been thinking about since breakfast but still haven’t touched.

You open your laptop or stand in the middle of the room ready to begin, and almost immediately your brain starts pulling in different directions.

Should I do the easier thing first?
How long is this actually going to take?
What if I forget the other thing I also need to do?
Maybe I should quickly tidy first so I can focus properly.

Twenty minutes later, you’ve been mentally active the entire time but somehow nothing has actually started.

And this is often the part that people misunderstand about ADHD.

From the outside, it can look like avoidance, procrastination, or poor motivation.

From the inside, it feels more like friction or a heavy weight.

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Most people assume that starting a task is a simple decision.

You either choose to do it or you don’t.

When ADHD parents or ADHD children struggle to get going, the explanation usually becomes:

“They need more discipline.”
“They just need to try harder.”
“They’re procrastinating.”

What often gets missed is how many executive functioning processes are involved before a task even begins.

Planning, prioritizing, task initiation, and organization are deeply interconnected executive functions, and when one becomes overloaded, the others often begin to wobble too.

Research into executive functioning consistently shows that ADHD affects the brain’s ability to manage and coordinate these systems efficiently, particularly in areas such as working memory, planning, inhibition, and organization… the so called ‘air traffic control tower.’

What this means in real life is that the difficulty is rarely about knowing that something matters.

The difficulty is often about creating enough internal clarity to begin.

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Planning requires the brain to think ahead, sequence steps, estimate time, and hold a mental roadmap of what needs to happen.

Prioritizing requires deciding what matters most while simultaneously suppressing competing thoughts, ideas, and responsibilities.

Task initiation involves shifting from intention into action, which sounds simple until you realize how much cognitive energy that transition actually requires.

Organization reduces mental clutter by helping the brain externalise information instead of holding everything internally.

For ADHD brains, many of these processes remain highly conscious rather than automated, which means the brain is constantly using active mental energy to manage tasks that other people may move through more intuitively. Research exploring executive functioning and ADHD repeatedly highlights the role of working memory, planning, organization, and self-regulation difficulties in daily functioning challenges.

This is why ADHD exhaustion is often cognitive before it is physical.

The brain is doing an enormous amount of invisible work behind the scenes. Some people equate it to the serene duck above water, furiously paddling with their feet below water.

This shows up quietly throughout the day in ways many parents don’t immediately recognize as executive function struggles.

Your child sits down to begin homework but spends twenty minutes deciding where to start, whether or not they need the toilet, or a drink, or the right pencil, or a sharper pencil...

You walk into a room to complete one task and suddenly remember three others that also feel urgent.

A project becomes mentally tangled because the brain is trying to hold every possible step at once rather than identifying the first accessible one.

Research into ADHD and productivity challenges has found that difficulties with time management, organization, prioritization, and task initiation often create a significant gap between intention and action.

And over time, this creates something deeper than frustration.

It creates self-doubt.

Because when someone repeatedly experiences difficulty translating intention into action, they begin questioning their own capability instead of recognizing the executive function load underneath.

Understanding this changes the way you respond to yourself and your child.

You stop assuming that awareness automatically leads to action.

You stop expecting the brain to organize itself efficiently under stress, overwhelm, fatigue, or heavy cognitive load.

Instead, you begin creating external clarity.

Clearer starting points.
Smaller visible steps.
Fewer competing priorities.
More external systems that reduce what the brain has to actively hold.

Research into executive functioning support consistently points toward strategies that reduce cognitive overload through routines, visual supports, structured systems, and breaking tasks into smaller components.

That shift matters because momentum and self-efficacy are deeply connected.

People build confidence through repeated experiences of successful follow-through, not through pressure or criticism.

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Instead of asking:

“How do I get everything done?”

Try asking:

“What is the clearest possible first step?”

Not the whole project.
Not the finished outcome.
Just the next visible movement into action.

You can also reduce prioritization fatigue by identifying your most important task before your cognitive load builds throughout the day.

The more decisions your brain has to make in the moment, the harder task initiation often becomes.

Reducing friction is often more effective than increasing pressure.

The next time starting feels impossible, pause before assuming the issue is motivation.

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ADHD parenting isn’t chaos. It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

At the same time, you’re thinking about:

What your child’s schedule is tomorrow, whether they’ve packed what they need, if that message needs a reply, something you forgot earlier, when is date night and then…

Someone asks you a simple question and something in you tightens.

The question itself might even be a simple yes/no questions is difficult but it tips you over the edge because your brain is already full.

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Most parents explain this moment away.

“I’m just tired.”

“I need to be more organised.”

“I should be able to handle this.”

It gets framed as a personal shortcoming, like you’re not managing things well enough.

But what you’re experiencing is friction between the mental load you’re carrying for your family and the way an ADHD brain processes that load.

The issue isn’t that there is too much to do (although I would hazard a guess that you are) but how much your brain has to actively hold, track, and revisit to keep everything moving.

Because mental load isn’t just tasks.

It’s remembering the tasks, sequencing them, deciding when to do them and keeping them active in your mind until they’re done, without distractions.

For ADHD brains, this isn’t automatic.

Each step requires conscious, intentional effort.

Working memory has to hold multiple threads at once and task switching happens more frequently. Attention is pulled in different directions.

So the load doesn’t just exist. It sits in your awareness all day like open tabs on a laptop and that ongoing processing is draining you.

This shows up in ways that don’t always look obvious.

You walk into a room and forget why you’re there, then remember three other things you need to do.

You start one task, get interrupted, and struggle to return to it.

You spend time deciding what to prioritize, then feel like nothing has actually been completed.

You remembered you didn’t reply to a message, so you go to message but get bamboozled by a cute cat versus cucumber video.

From the outside, it can look like disorganization but from the inside, it feels like constant mental movement with very little rest.

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When you understand this, and bring this reality into your self-awareness, the pressure changes.

You stop expecting your brain to hold everything at once.

You stop measuring your capacity against a system that relies on automation.

You stop trying to fit into systems that were built for neurotypical people.

You begin to see that the issue isn’t effort but load and that shift creates space to do things differently.

Instead of trying to manage everything in your head, start noticing what can be taken out of it.

I personally use a differentiated to do list and block system that works well for me, and the relief I get knowing that I have a safety net for all my thoughts is empowering and makes me feel so light.

Remember, you’re not solving everything.

You’re reducing what your brain has to carry in the moment and that’s what creates calm.

The next time you feel that tension build, pause for a second.

What is your brain holding right now that it doesn’t need to?

If this feels familiar, I write regularly about how ADHD shows up in everyday family life and what actually helps.

ADHD parenting is not chaos.

It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

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Connection or boundaries.

Be more understanding or be more consistent.

Hold space or hold the line.

And parents are left trying to balance both in real time, often in the hardest moments of the day, when everyone’s capacity is already low.

What I’ve learned over time is that this isn’t about choosing one over the other.

It’s about sequencing them because without connection, boundaries just don’t land the way we think they will.

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Connection is often described as something soft. Something relational that “feels nice” but isn’t always seen as essential.

For ADHD kids, it is essential because connection regulates the nervous system and when a child feels safe, seen, and understood, their brain shifts out of protection mode and into a state where they can think, respond, and engage.

Without that shift, you’re trying to build skills on top of a system that isn’t available.

When a child is dysregulated, boundaries don’t disappear but their ability to respond to them does.

You might repeat the instruction or raise your voice and you can even hold the consequence but if the nervous system isn’t settled, you’re working against something stronger than behaviour… biology (and I don’t care how awesome you think you are, you just can’t beat biology).

That’s why so many parents feel like boundaries “don’t work.”

It’s not that the boundary is wrong, but that the timing is off.

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What ADHD adds to this

ADHD doesn’t remove the need for boundaries but it does increase the need for connection before those boundaries can be applied.

ADHD affects:

Attention

Impulse control

Emotional regulation and

Working memory

all of which are required to respond to expectations so when a child doesn’t follow through, it’s easy to interpret that as unwillingness.

But often, it’s a lack of access in that moment and connection, is what restores that access.

The order matters. When connection comes first, something changes.

The child feels safer. The system settles. The brain becomes more available.

And then the boundary has somewhere to land.

Not as a threat or pressure but as something understandable and predictable.

Something they can actually act on.

Connection doesn’t replace boundaries but it does makes them more effective.

Because the goal can’t be compliance in the moment. The goal is to build the ability and the capacity to follow through over time.

And that’s where self-efficacy comes in.

Self-efficacy is built through repeated experiences of:

“I know what to do.”

“I can do it.”

“I’ve done it before.”

and that only happens when the child is regulated enough to try, and supported enough to succeed.

If every interaction starts in tension, resistance, or correction, those success experiences become harder to access and, reluctance to even try increases.

When interactions begin with connection however, the pathway opens and over time, the child begins to trust their own ability to meet expectations.

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There was a moment this year with my oldest that brought all of this into sharp focus. He had a year-long school project to complete.

It was open-ended, which meant he had a lot of agency in choosing what he wanted to do. The brief was to follow something he was genuinely interested in.

As a tennis player and a huge tennis fan, he immediately wanted to design and build a wooden tennis racket in the school workshop.

It made sense on the surface and I could totally see why he would pick this particular project as a kinaesthetic learner, but I could see the full picture.

This wasn’t just a passion project. It came with constraints.

He would need access to the design workshop, which meant a teacher had to be present at all times.

It required technical woodwork skills he didn’t yet have.

It added layers of logistics and dependency that were outside his control.

And, alongside that, I knew his profile.

Working memory.

Planning.

Time management.

Organisation.

All of the executive functions that a long-term project relies on were areas he still needed support in.

I wanted him to feel ownership over his choice but I really wanted him to experience success.

So we opened it up. We brainstormed other ideas based on his interests.

We used AI to map out what each project might look like over the course of the year, including the time investment and constraints.

One idea stood out. A mindset journal for athletes. It aligned with his love of sport and his interest in psychology.

He could work on it at home or at school and it removed the dependency on space, equipment, and other people.

It gave him a clearer path but… he still wasn’t convinced. So I let him think about it and every time I checked in, he said the same thing;

“I’ve thought about it. It’s a good idea… but I still want to make the racket.”

At that point, I knew what was coming.

The structure around the project simply didn’t match what his brain needed to follow through. So I made the decision and I told him I was saying no to the racket.

I told him that I was going to make that call for him and that I knew he wouldn’t agree with it now but that later, when the project was complete, he would understand why.

He paused.

And then he said, “Okay.”

Something in me reacted to that. I 100% projected into the future because the last thing I want is for my child to go through life just saying “okay” to people or just doing what he’s told.

So I said that to him - that I wanted him to question me, to challenge me or at least to have a conversation with me.

And what he said next stopped me.

“I know you worry about that,” he said.

“But you’ve never made decisions like this for me before… and I trust you. So that’s enough for me.”

And that was the moment. The moment where everything we had been building over the years came into view. Not obedience, not compliance, just trust.

That moment didn’t come from one decision. It came from years of connection.

From sitting together at the end of the day, from laughing and being silly. From listening to them talk about rocks or Legos or bugs or whatever was the centre of their world at the time. From dance parties and sock wars. From creating a relationship where we actually enjoy each other.

Connection builds trust and trust is what allows you to step in when it matters.

To guide, to hold the line, to make decisions your child might not yet be able to make for themselves.

Without breaking the relationship.

There will be moments in parenting where connection alone is not enough.

Where you do need to step in and where you do need to say no.

Where you need to hold a boundary that your child doesn’t agree with and when that moment comes, what carries it is not the logic of your decision.

It’s the strength of your relationship.

Connection is not just about making your child feel good in the moment.

It’s what allows you to have influence later. It’s what allows your child to trust your judgment. It’s what allows them to borrow your regulation, your perspective, and your decision-making when theirs isn’t fully online yet.

And that’s why connection must come first.

It doesn’t replaces boundaries but it’s the glue that makes trust stick.

ADHD parenting isn’t chaos.

It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

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Most parents I speak to are saying the same thing multiple times a day.

“Put your shoes away.”

“Start your homework.”

“Come down for dinner.”

And after the third or fourth time, frustration builds.

Because from the outside, it looks like your child isn’t listening but in most ADHD households, that’s not what’s happening.

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The Assumption That Is Easy To Make

We assume that if a child has heard the instruction, they should be able to act on it.

Listening leads directly to doing, doesn’t it?

For ADHD brains, there’s a gap in the middle between hearing and starting.

Working memory, attention, and task initiation all sit in that space.

If any of those are under strain, the instruction simply doesn’t convert into action in the way we expect it to.

And it isn’t because they don’t want to do it. This is important to remember.

Their brain just can’t hold onto it long enough to begin.

Why Repeating Doesn’t Work

When something isn’t done, the instinct is to repeat it.

You say it again, maybe a bit louder, maybe with more urgency but every time we repeat an instruction, we’re adding more input into a system that is already overloaded.

The brain is now holding:

The original instruction,

the repeated instruction,

the tone shift,

the emotional pressure that comes with it,

and instead of making action more likely, it often makes it less.

This is where things start to escalate because the system is becoming harder to access.

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What I Don’t Rely On

I don’t rely on my kids remembering what I’ve said.

And that might sound counterintuitive at first but once you understand how much effort goes into holding and acting on information throughout the day, it starts to make sense.

By the time they get home, their brains have already processed more than we can see.

Instructions, social expectations, emotional regulation, sensory input.

All of it adds up, so expecting a verbal instruction to land, stay, and convert into action consistently is unrealistic because the conditions aren’t set up for success.

What I Focus On Instead

If I want my kids to follow through, I don’t start with the instruction.

I start with the system around it.

There are three things I pay attention to.

Clarity.

Timing.

Structure.

Clarity

If an instruction isn’t clear, it becomes another thing the brain has to interpret.

“Get ready” is not clear.

“Start your homework” is not always clear.

What subject? What needs to be done first? Where do they start?

The more thinking required, the less likely it is to happen.

So I reduce the number of steps, I make things visible where possible and I try to ensure that the entry point is obvious.

Starting is usually where things break down.

Timing

There are moments in the day where no instruction is going to land well.

Walking through the door after school is one of them and you can read more about that here:

Mid-transition is another.

If I give an instruction when their system is already full, I’m simply not setting them up to succeed but I am adding to the load.

So I pay attention to when I’m asking, not just what I’m asking.

That one shift has reduced a huge amount of friction in our house.

Structure

I remember when I was so frustrated about repeating myself to my kids. I zoomed out and reflected on the bigger picture. I came to the conclusion that if something only works when I say it, it doesn’t work.

It means I am the system and that’s not sustainable for me, or for them (hello mental load).

So, we build things into the environment instead.

Where things go is obvious.

What comes next is predictable.

What needs to be done doesn’t have to be remembered from scratch each time.

This isn’t about making everything rigid, because flexibility for our brain is key but it is about reducing how much the brain has to hold at any given moment.

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The Shift That Changed Everything

Instead of asking:

“Why aren’t they doing what I said?”

I ask:

“What is stopping them from starting?”

Because most of the time, the issue isn’t willingness but access.

Access to the step.

Access to the starting point.

Access to enough capacity to start.

Where Self-Efficacy Comes In

You will hear me go on and on about self-efficacy and this part matters more than most people realize.

Self-efficacy is the foundational block to positive mental health.

Read that again.

Self-efficacy is the foundational block to positive mental health.

Confidence isn’t built through reminders or pressure.

It’s built through repeated experiences of success.

When a child knows what to do, can start it, and completes it, something begins to shift internally.

“I can do this.”

“I know how to do this.”

“I’ve done this before.”

That’s how self-efficacy develops.

Through experiencing it and that only happens when the system allows for it.

This isn’t about obedience. I’m not trying to get my kids to do what I say because I said it.

I’m trying to create an environment where follow-through is possible, and where expectations are clear.

An environment where the starting point is accessible and where the load is manageable.

When those pieces are in place, I don’t need to repeat myself because the system, or the structure, is doing more of the work.

If you find yourself repeating instructions over and over again, it’s worth pausing, zooming out and reflecting.

Ask yourself the question "‘is it the instruction or the system?’

Because in most ADHD homes, the issue isn’t defiance but design.

And when the design changes, so does everything that follows.

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ADHD parenting isn’t chaos.

It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

I parent based on the behaviour they show me.

That line tends to make people pause because it sounds strict but what it has created in our house is something very different.

Clarity.

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The exercise that changed everything

A few years ago, I asked my kids to write a list of everything they feel they are entitled to as an 11- and a 13-year-old.

The list was long.

• Walking to school independently.

• Meeting friends on their own.

• Having privacy.

• Watching age-appropriate films.

All reasonable. Then I asked them a second question.

Which of these would be acceptable for a five-year-old?

And this was where the shift happened.

Making the connection visible

We made a second list.

This time, I wrote down the things I, as a parent, would still need to do for a five-year-old.

• Reminding.

• Following up.

• Supervising.

• Holding more of the structure.

And we compared the two lists and the penny dropped. Both boys identified that perhaps I was still parenting 5 year olds. No one was to blame of course. We just fell into this cycle of learned helplessness, where I enabled and they didn’t learn the skills.

Why this matters for ADHD kids

One of the biggest challenges for ADHD brains is linking action to outcome over time, because the connection isn’t always experienced consistently.

This is where self-efficacy comes in again.

Confidence builds when a child can see:

“When I do this, this happens.”

Consistently.

By making the relationship between behaviour and independence visible, ambiguity (one of the hardest things for ADHD brains to capture) is removed.

And when ambiguity is reduced, follow-through becomes more accessible.

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Not all behaviour is the same

This is the part that matters most because ADHD does impact behaviour and executive function challenges are real.

Task initiation.

Working memory.

Emotional regulation.

These are areas where my kids still need support and they are not judged for that.

They are coached, supported and given structure that allows them to succeed.

But not everything sits in that category.

There are behaviours that are choices and when everything is treated as a skill gap, children lose the opportunity to experience accountability in a meaningful way, which we do not want.

Why this approach works

This approach works because it removes the need to decide everything in the moment.

We are not negotiating from scratch each time something comes up we are referring back to something that has already been made clear.

You know what you’re capable of, you know what you’re working on and you know what comes with that level of responsibility.

And so do I.

The link to confidence

Contrary to popular belief, this is not about control.

It’s about building a sense of capability.

When expectations are predictable, children begin to experience success more consistently and they begin to see themselves as someone who can meet expectations, someone who can be trusted and someone who can manage increasing levels of independence.

That is self-efficacy in practice.

Not something we tell them but something they experience and live. Somatic experience leading to somatic memory and for ADHD brains this is imperative.

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What this creates over time

What this has created in our house is not perfection. Trust me, there are still moments of pushback and we still have moments of frustration but there is far less confusion, far less negotiation and far less emotional escalation.

Because the structure is already there.

And that structure carries the load when capacity is low.

We build anything new into the structure of our lives not create new structure so that it is as seamless as possible.

My kids know what they are capable of, they know what they are still working on and they know that their level of independence reflects both.

There is no guessing or shifting expectations and no constant renegotiation.

And for ADHD kids, that matters.

And because the path is clear, success becomes repeatable which is vital for ADHD brains because repeatable success builds confidence.

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ADHD parenting isn’t chaos.

It’s structure, clarity, and brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

They want to be understanding. They know their child’s brain works differently. They’ve read about regulation, executive function, nervous systems. And, they want to hold boundaries that actually work.

And yet, something still feels off. Because alongside that understanding, there is also frustration.

Things don’t get done.

Conversations escalate quickly and they find themselves repeating the same requests over and over again.

And then comes the question that sits underneath all of it:

How do I support my child… without everything turning into a negotiation?

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Why understanding alone isn’t enough

Over the past few years, parenting conversations have shifted in an important way.

We talk more about regulation, more about nervous systems and more about executive function.

That shift is so important.

But something has quietly been lost in the process because understanding your child’s brain does not remove the need for structure.

It actually increases it.

What happens when expectations are unclear

When expectations are vague, everything becomes flexible and while flexibility sounds supportive, in practice it often creates something else.

More decisions.

More conversations.

More emotional escalation.

You ask them to do something and they push back.

You explain and they resist.

You adjust and they negotiate.

Before long, you’re both frustrated, and nothing has actually moved forward.

Your child isn’t being difficult they are cognitively overloaded.

For ADHD brains, decision-making is effortful.

Working out what is expected, when it applies, and whether it matters in this moment requires energy.

When expectations are unclear, you are asking your child to solve that puzzle repeatedly throughout the day.

Why this matters for confidence

Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy tells us that confidence doesn’t come from praise or intention.

It comes from repeated experiences of success.

Small, consistent moments where effort leads to a predictable outcome.

When expectations shift, change, or depend on the moment, those success experiences become harder to access because the pathway isn’t clear enough to follow consistently.

For ADHD brains, this matters more than we often realize because decision-making is effortful.

Working out what to do, when to do it, how to start, whether to continue… all of this requires energy and when expectations are not clearly defined, you are adding even more to that load.

You are asking your child to constantly interpret what is required of them and at the same time, you are carrying that mental load as well.

Which is why so many parents feel like they are holding everything together because they are.

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Boundaries are not the opposite of connection

This is where the misunderstanding often sits.

Boundaries are not about control. Repeat after me: boundaries are not about control.

They are not about shutting down emotion or ignoring your child’s experience.

They are about reducing the number of decisions that need to be made in the moment, therefore reducing cognitive load.

They create predictability and remove the need for constant negotiation, allowing a child to focus o execution rather than interpretation.

And for ADHD kids, that is not restrictive.

It is relieving.

What clear boundaries actually give you

When expectations are clear, something shifts.

You are no longer deciding everything in real time nor negotiating every request.

You are no longer relying on your child’s capacity in a moment where that capacity may already be low.

Instead, you are working from something that already exists.

A shared understanding of what is expected.

Of what is flexible and what is not.

That doesn’t remove emotion, they can still feel sad about something. It doesn’t remove difficulty, the task might still be hard.

But it changes the tone and is where self-efficacy starts to build because the child begins to experience:

“I know what to do.”

“I can do this.”

“I’ve done this before.”

Where this leads

Once clarity is in place, you can begin to step back where your child is capable and step in where they still need support. You can start to align independence with responsibility.

Not based on age but based on what they are consistently showing you.

And that’s where this becomes practical, because this isn’t about theory.

It shows up in very real, everyday decisions.

You can read more about how we level up from ‘assistant manager’ to ‘manager’ here

In the next piece, I’ll walk you through exactly how we do this in our house and how we connect behavior, responsibility, and independence in a way that feels fair, predictable and achievable.

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ADHD parenting isn’t chaos.

It’s clarity and brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

One of the most helpful parts of this conversation was asking what makes that moment harder than it needs to be because, oftentimes, most parents are not trying to make things worse. They are actually trying to help.

What came through clearly from both my boys is that timing matters more than intention.

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When I asked what tends to trigger frustration, the answers were consistent.

• Being told off the moment they walk in the door.

• Being reminded of something they did wrong earlier in the day.

• Being asked multiple questions straight away.

• Being given instructions before they’ve had a chance to settle.

At one point, I asked what it would feel like if they walked in and were immediately told what to do.

The response was instant:

“Walk back out the door.”

It sounds dramatic, but the message underneath it is not.

There is no space in that moment. No recovery. No capacity.

We also talked about how nonstop questions feel, because this is something many of us default to as parents.

“How was your day?”

“What homework do you have?”

“How did that test go?”

On the surface, these are simple, reasonable, even caring.

But Tomás described the internal response like this:

“I don’t want to deal with this right now. Not because I’m trying to be annoying or difficult but I’m not ready yet.”

When I asked what would actually help in that moment, the answers were surprisingly consistent.

• Time

• Quiet

• Food

• Space

“Snack does it for me,” Filipe said.

“Maybe just being allowed to sit on the sofa for a bit.”

Tomás added something that I think is particularly important for parents to hear:

“Just being there… not asking questions… just being in the room.”

That distinction matters, right? Presence without pressure. Connection without demand.

For one of my children, connection wasn’t even the priority unless the day had been particularly difficult. For the other, it depended on the situation and the person.

What became clear is that this isn’t one-size-fits-all.

It depends on the child.

It depends on the day.

It depends on what their system has just carried.

It depends on us, as parents too, because if we are regulated, this transition unfolds in a different way.

When we talked about timing, they both landed on something similar.

“About 10 minutes.”

But even that came with a caveat.

“Again, it depends on the day.”

That nuance is important, because parents are walking into this moment without knowing what kind of day their child has had. And the reality that comes up from this conversation is that they will tell you, once you have given them the time to relax.

So instead of assuming readiness, they encouraged parents to ask.

Not in a way that demands an answer, but in a way that offers choice.

“Do you want to talk now or later?”

“Are you ready to unpack your day?”

And parents, more importantly, be okay with the answer being “not yet.”

Because for many of them, the preference is clear.

“Connect later.”

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When we moved into what an ideal after-school routine would look like, what they described wasn’t complicated.

Arrive home.

Say hello.

Have a snack.

Sit for a bit.

Then move into homework.

Then personal time.
(We have implemented personal time since the boys were babies. They need and I need it.)

Then dinner, where conversations tend to happen more naturally.

There was also an interesting addition.

“Maybe doing something before dinner… like a family activity or a game first.”

Something that shifts the state before engaging.

This is regulation at kid level. Family time to alleviate the stress response, but not immediately. Give them time to land.

And finally, I asked what they would want parents to understand about this moment.

The answer, again, was simple.

“Give time… connect later. We know you love us, now show us.”

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What Do We Do With This

What struck me most about this conversation is how aligned it is with what we know about the nervous system, executive function, and emotional regulation.

And yet, it sounds very different when it comes from them.

This isn’t about behaviour getting worse at home. They don’t see it that way at all.

It’s about what it takes to hold it together at school and about home being the safe place where the release happens given that this effort is no longer required.

It’s about timing.

And it’s about understanding that when a child walks through the door, you are not meeting them at the start of their day, you are meeting them at the end of it.

Which means the question shifts.

From “What do I need them to do right now?”

To “What does their system need in this moment to recover?”

Because when that piece is in place, everything that comes after becomes easier.

For them. And, as a result of this, for you.

ADHD parenting isn’t chaos. It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

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This week, I wanted to step back and understand that moment from a different angle.

So I sat down with my kids, aged 13 and 15, both diagnosed at age 11, and asked them what it actually feels like when they walk through the door after school.

I was curious to know not only what it looks like from the outside but what it feels like on the inside.

What they said has stayed with me and, as usual, what they share in general continues to inform the work that I do with others.

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Filipe (13) described it simply:

“I’m just like… yes. I’m home now.”

Tomás (15) said:

“At school it’s my work mind.”

There was no drama in their answers, no sense that something had gone wrong. It was just a clear shift, from effort to ease. From performance to rest.

My two kiddos are vastly different and although I do feel the need for context for you regarding who they are and how ADHD impacts them, I think I will save this for a future post. For now, know they are awesome, charismatic, extremely funny and incredibly wise.

When I asked what changed in their body once they walked in the door, Filipe said something I don’t think I’ll forget:

“I don’t have to use my body as much anymore.”

The phrasing struck me. Not “I relax.” Not “I feel calm.”

“I don’t have to use my body.”

Tomás described it slightly differently:

“It feels like I can put down mental barriers and social structures that I use at school… like a school personality leaves and another one comes in.”

When I asked which one was the “real” version, the answer was immediate:

“They’re both me. I just use them at different times.”

That is the part I think we miss as adults.

We often assume that the child we see at school is the stable version, and the child we see at home is the one that needs fixing.

But what if both are real?

What if school requires a version of them that is structured, regulated, contained, and socially aligned… and home is the only place where the system can finally let go of that effort?

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One of the most important insights came when we talked about emotional regulation.

“It’s harder to keep at home,” Filipe said.

When I asked why, the answer was immediate.

“Because I’ve used it all at school.”

There it is. Not a lack of regulation but a depletion of it.

At school, they are managing expectations, following rules, filtering what they say, controlling impulses, navigating social dynamics, and keeping themselves within acceptable boundaries.

They are doing this for hours and by the time they get home, the system that has been holding all of that in place is tired. And I think we, as adults can relate to this too.

When I asked how was home different, Tomás said,

“I was going to say I feel safe at home, but then I would add that I also feel safe at school, so it’s a different kind of safe, perhaps?”

Filipe added, “I agree. We can argue and disagree with you and we know we are not going to be expelled or punished. I think that leads to more ‘rule flexing’.”

Home, whether we realise it or not, is the place where that effort is released because it feels safe, accepting and capable of holding all of their feelings.

Part 2, coming out later this week, delves into what makes this transition harder, and what helps.

ADHD parenting isn’t chaos. It’s brain science you. haven’t been taught yet.

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Because the goal isn’t to react to this moment but to respond to it. And, over time, to practice the skills within it.

It might not feel possible to do this… yet.

But practicing emotional regulation skills in the middle of emotional release is often the perfect time for learning to happen.

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If you need a recap on this read Monday’s article here:

By the time your child arrives home, their system is already full. So is yours.

What happens next determines whether it spills over… or settles.

The move between school and home is not just a location change. It’s a nervous system transition.

Both you and your child have been managing expectations on systems that haven’t had the space to reset throughout the day. Once home, regulation is released.

As my 15 year old said when he was 8,
”At home I am fully myself. Out there, I have to be me in the world.”

Home isn’t where behavior gets worse.
It’s where the system finally lets go.

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Most homes unintentionally increase demand at exactly the wrong time.

We start with questions, instructions, corrections.

“How was your day?”
”What homework do you have?
”Put your bag away”
”Where’s your swim kit?”
”Take your shoes off”

But at this moment, the nervous system needs less input, not more.

That’s where escalation begins.

This moment, the first 10 to 30 minutes of being at home, is not about doing more.

It’s about reducing what the brain has to process.

We can think about this through three levers:

1. Lowering expectations

2. Reducing decisions

3. Supporting regulation

1. Lowering expectations (temporarily)

This is often where parents hesitate, because lowering expectations sounds like lowering standards but this is simply not the case. It’s about sequencing them and this creates conditions for follow through later.

Expect less in the moment so capacity can rebuild.

This might look like delaying non-essential tasks such as homework or tidying, allowing a slower entry into the home, and accepting that transitions may look messy before they settle.

Because they will settle.

Think about it. The last thing you want when you walk in the door is someone telling you what to do, asking questions, or adding pressure.

Children are no different.

Lowering expectations in this window doesn’t create avoidance. It creates the conditions for follow-through later.

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2. Reducing decisions

By this point in the day, decision-making is depleted.

So reduce the number of choices required. Every question or open ended choice is a demand on a tired system. Even simple ones.

The fewer decisions there are to make, the more capacity there is for regulation.

This might look like offering limited choices instead of open-ended ones, pre-deciding parts of the routine so the next step is already known, and removing unnecessary questions in the first 10 to 20 minutes.

Clarity reduces load, not control.

You are creating a path of least resistance for both you and your children. A place for bags that makes sense. A predictable flow. A snack that doesn’t require a decision.

Less thinking. More settling.

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3. Supporting Regulation (before anything else)

Before behavior improves, regulation needs to happen. But regulations doesn’t look the same for every child.

It’s not one strategy.

It’s a category.

For some, it looks like movement, jumping, pacing, stretching. For others, it’s sensory input such as quiet, pressure, music or space. Sometimes it’s low impact connection, like sitting close by, light conversation without demands. And sometimes, it’s withdrawal, choosing to sit in their room decompressing and in silence.

The goal is not to stop the release but to shape it safely.

One of the most powerful things you can do here is to model for them out loud.

Walk in the door and say,

“I had a long day today. I’m going to take a shower and reset before dinner.”

or

“I need ten minutes of quiet before we hang out.”

The more ADHD children hear this, the more likely they are to internalize it.

Building this into structure

This is where most advice falls apart.

Because giving parenting tips relies on parents remembering what to do in the moment and ADHD parents can’t rely on willpower or memory.

So we build it into the structure instead.

Take a look at your current set up/schedule and think about the 3 levers above:

lowering expectations, reducing decisions and supporting regulation.

What are you noticing about how this moment looks in your house right now

Structure carries what the nervous system cannot and so it is imperative to set it up in a way that allows the nervous system to catch up.

Embedding Skill Practice

This time of day is not just about preventing escalation.

It’s an opportunity to build skills over time.

During this time you are quietly supporting things like recognising internal states through modeling, transitioning between environments, choosing regulation strategies, and delaying demands without avoiding them.

Not perfectly, but repeatedly.

In our house, we keep it simple. Shoes come off at the door. This small act signals a shift - moving from the outside world into home. This was actually my son’s idea when he was 9, after one particularly hard afternoon.

I highly, highly encourage asking your children for input here. Let them know that this moment in the day can feel difficult and that you’re looking for ways to make it easier together. ADHD kids are often incredibly insightful ad creative when given the oppoortunity.

Use this.

It’s not just support. It’s ownership.

This is how skills develop because regulation is not something we are born with. It’s something we learn, practice, fail at, reflect on and improve in.

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Don’t Forget Yourself

As noted in this article, you are entering this moment with the same depletion.

You also need reduced input. You also benefit from fewer decisions and, as the adult, your regulation sets the tone.

These first 10 minutes don’t fix everything but they do change the trajectory of the evening.

They create space for regulation before expectation and that shift is often the difference between escalation and something more manageable.

You don’t need a perfect routine. You just need a softer entry.

ADHD parenting isn’t chaos.
It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

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My kids’ backpacks weren’t where they were supposed to be, my kids were eating on the sofa, no plates. The final push was when I sighed and tried to calmly suggest that the boys should eat at the table, only to be met with defensive pushback (cue indignant and explosive outrage).

When I posted this note, I had a feeling it would resonate.

After all, this moment, the 5pm trigger, is not unique. It happens in homes everywhere.

In ADHD households, however, you are working with depleted neurobiology squared (maybe cubed if your partner also has ADHD).
You are operating with lower emotional regulation, a narrower window of tolerance, sensory input that is harder to filter and low dopamine to boot.

That build-up over the day, for both you and the kids, reaches capacity around the time of arriving home for many reasons.

ADHD brains spend an inordinate amount of time making decisions, many of which are small, invisible, and ultimately inconsequential. But the mental effort involved in constantly scanning, choosing, adjusting, and re-evaluating is significant. It drains cognitive energy quickly, especially when those decisions are paired with rumination and second-guessing. In addition to this, we often don’t create opportunities to replenish or reset our nervous system throughout the day.

I wrote about this last week and you can catch up on this here:

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For kids, the load looks different but is just as heavy.

At school, they are managing social expectations, learning to be an individual within a group while still following collective rules. They are tolerating sensory environments that may sit right at or beyond, their threshold. They are holding instructions in working memory, trying to keep pace with expectations, and navigating emotional experiences with peers and adults that can feel intense or confusing.

All of this requires effort that is rarely visible.

By the time they arrive home, they are no longer able to hold it all together in the same way.

Home becomes the place where they can finally release what has been building all day, the anti-mask if you will.

Children are still developing their nervous systems. They are learning to navigate the emotional intersection that is being a child, processing emotional experiences through trial and error.
When you layer this with ADHD neurowiring, where access to regulation is inconsistent at best, what you see is not a child choosing to “fall apart,” but a child who does not yet know how to come down from their day.
These are social and emotional skills and need to be taught, practiced, and failed at in order to become proficient.

Home, around 5pm or thereabouts, isn’t where behavior gets worse. It’s where regulation is released. Knowing what healthy release looks like and embedding it seamlessly into your structure is key to managing this time and more importantly, to building capacity for the future.

This is the foundation.

In the next piece, I’ll walk through what this looks like in real time, especially those first 10 minutes after school.

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The biggest misunderstanding about this moment is that it is frames as a behavior problem when it is actually a capacity issue.

When we understand this as depletion, everything changes. We can access more compassion for both ourselves and our children, and instead of trying to control behavior, we begin to look at the environment and ask how it can better support regulation.

When you stop seeing this as behavior to manage, you stop pushing. Instead, you start reducing.
Reducing expectations and demands.

Reducing decisions required in that moment.

You’ll hear me say this often:
Build it into the structure.

Because ADHD is variable, and when variability is high, reliance on willpower, or “in the moment” strategies become unreliable. Structure carries what the nervous system cannot.

5pm isn’t about behavior. It’s about loss of access to ability.

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When we understand that, the question changes from
How do I fix this behavior?

to

What does this moment need to feel manageable?

So if 5pm isn’t about behavior, what do you actually do instead? I’ll unpack that next.

ADHD parenting isn’t chaos.
It’s brain science you have not been taught yet.

The door opens.

Backpacks hit the floor.

Someone asks what’s for dinner.

And something in you tightens.

Not because anything particularly bad has happened.

But because you’re already tired.

What most people don’t see is that by the time this moment arrives, your brain has already done an enormous amount of work.

Not physical work.

Decision work.

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From the moment you wake up, your brain starts making choices.

• What to prioritise.

• What to delay.

• What to respond to.

• What to ignore.

For ADHD brains, this process isn’t automatic.

It’s active.

You are constantly scanning, choosing, adjusting your life, your time, your attention.

Do I answer that message now or later?

Do I start this task or finish the other one first?

Did I forget something?

What’s coming up next?

Each decision seems small but they accumulate over the course of the day.

And alongside this, you’re not just managing your own life.

You’re also scanning, choosing, and adjusting your children’s lives too.

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Why this hits ADHD brains harder

Many of these decisions are handled more automatically in neurotypical brains but for ADHD brains, they often require conscious effort.

Every hour you are:

• holding multiple possibilities in mind

• managing time without a stable internal clock

• switching attention more frequently

• regulating impulses while trying to stay on track

Which means your brain is doing more work behind the scenes just to get through a normal day.

By the time the afternoon arrives, that system is already tired.

There is research to support this.

Psychologists have long studied something called decision fatigue which is the idea that the quality of our decisions deteriorates after an extended period of decision-making.

As mental energy is used throughout the day, the brain begins to conserve resources, making it harder to prioritise, regulate emotions, and choose effectively.

When you layer this with what we know about ADHD (differences in executive functioning, working memory, and self-regulation and inconsistent production of dopamine), it makes sense that by late afternoon, the system is not just tired, but depleted. Finished. Empty.

Some of the most draining choices don’t even feel like choices.

They look like:

• remembering to follow up on something

• deciding how to respond to a message

• choosing what not to do

• managing interruptions

• restarting after being pulled away

Even emotional regulation involves decisions.

“Do I react?”

“Do I hold it in?”

“Do I say something now or later?”

“Will I regret saying this? Too late, I’ve said it.”

This is the cognitive and emotional labour that happens all day. Every day.

And then, just as your capacity is dropping…

The demands increase.

Dinner.

Homework.

Transitions.

Dysregulated bodies walking in through the door.

Multiple people needing things at the same time.

But at this point your brain isn’t starting fresh. It’s already on red.

Depletion doesn’t always look dramatic.

It can look like:

Snapping more quickly.

Yelling.

Feeling overwhelmed by simple questions.

Struggling to choose what to do next.

Wanting everything to stop.

Not because the situation is actually extreme but because your internal resources are low and your nervous system is at capacity.

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And here is why this matters.

If you believe this moment is about behaviour, you’ll try to fix behaviour.

You’ll try to be more patient.

More organised.

More in control.

And when that doesn’t work, it feels personal. Add a peppering of guilt and a smattering of shame and you have a complete downward spiral.

But if you understand this moment as depletion, the response changes.

You don’t push harder. Instead you reduce the number of decisions.

You simplify.

You lower the load instead of increasing expectations.

And when the input changes, your behaviour changes with it, without resistance.

So instead of asking:

“How do I handle everything right now?”

Try asking:

“What can I remove?”

“What can wait?”

“What actually matters for the next 30 minutes?”

Because at 5pm, success doesn’t come from doing more.

It comes from needing less.

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ADHD parenting isn’t chaos.

It’s invisible load and brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

But what if that framing is part of the issue?

Because when you look more closely, especially in ADHD adults and high-functioning individuals, what we call imposter syndrome often isn’t a lack of ability.

I remember coaching a 10th grader a few years back. At the end of the coaching cycle, I presented his parents with a report. His dad sat there reading it and then paused. He said he could see himself in it.

Not as a parent but as a professional.

He shared that he often felt like an imposter at work. So I wondered out loud with him.

What if this feeling of “I’m not good enough” isn’t actually about not being good enough?

What if it’s this instead:

“I can see what I don’t know yet.”

That’s not insecurity. That’s deep and thoughtful reflection.

That’s metacognition, or, thinking about your own thinking. And very often, it sits alongside a higher level of sensitivity to your environment, your performance, and your impact.

When you look at it this way, the pattern starts to make sense.

People with ADHD, who question themselves more, who often evaluate their performance more closely, who constantly compare what they believe they’re capable of with what they’ve actually produced, tend to lack self-belief and self-trust.

Without self-trust, reflection doesn’t stay as reflection.

It turns into self-doubt.

You notice the gaps. You see what could be better. You hold yourself to a high(er) internal standard.

But what if it’s not a weakness?

What if instead we choose to see it as a sign of depth.

The issue that creates imposter syndrome is how that awareness is interpreted. Instead of thinking, “I’m growing,” your brain quietly lands on, “I’m failing.”

And that’s fertile ground for imposter syndrome to take root.

Not because you lack ability, but because your awareness has nowhere safe to land.

If your experience of yourself has been inconsistent, which ADHD offers a-plenty, it becomes very hard to trust your own performance, your own ability, your own being.

So the brain tries to make sense of that inconsistency.

“That success doesn’t count.”

“I just got lucky.”

“I can’t rely on myself to do that again.”

Over time, those thoughts start to feel like evidence. But they’re not evidence of a lack of ability. They’re evidence of inconsistent access to that ability.

And that’s a very different thing.

Which is why calling this a confidence issue misses the point, because it’s not that you don’t believe in your ability in general. It’s that you don’t trust its consistency.

The underlying thought of “I can’t do this” is really “What if I can’t do this again?”

That’s a self-trust problem.

Therefore, it needs a different kind of response. One that doesn’t try to eliminate doubt, but understand it.

Because doubt, in this context, isn’t a flaw. It’s often a byproduct of paying attention.

Of caring about what you’re doing.

Of seeing nuance.

The shift cannot be to remove the doubt but instead to interpret it differently.

Instead of saying, “I feel like an imposter,” you might begin to see it as:

“I am a reflective person operating in uncertainty.”

That keeps the awareness, but removes the judgment and it allows two things to exist at the same time.

That you are competent.

And that you are still learning.

For many people, especially those with ADHD, those two ideas have always felt incompatible, but they’re not.

In fact, being able to hold both is what allows you to grow without collapsing into self-doubt. It’s the hug of compassion that you so desperately need.

If you want something practical to ground this in, try this:

What are you actually good at, based on evidence?What still feels uncertain? And can both of those be true at the same time?

Because often they are. And when you allow that, something shifts.

Imposter syndrome stops being a verdict and starts becoming information.

A signal that your awareness is active, that your standards are high, and that what’s missing isn’t ability but trust.

Trust doesn’t come from thinking differently, it comes from collecting evidence.

Small, repeated experiences that show your brain:

“I’ve done this before.”

“I can do this again.”

“And if I can’t, I can figure it out.”

You don’t need less doubt, you need a different relationship with it because doubt is not the problem.

Uninterpreted doubt creates the spiral, and once you see that, imposter syndrome stops feeling like something to get rid of.

And starts looking more like something to understand and reframe.

ADHD parenting isn’t chaos.
It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

They are often small, practical shifts in how learning is structured and presented:

• clear written instructions

• visual task breakdowns

• movement opportunities

• shorter work intervals

• predictable routines

Yet these adjustments are often treated as “extra support” rather than good teaching.

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Designing for variability, instead of exceptions

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) starts from a different assumption.

It recognises that variability in how students learn is the norm, not the exception.

Instead of asking,

“How do we support this one student?”

UDL asks,

“How do we design learning so more students can access it from the start?”

ADHD learners make this variability visible, but they are not the only ones who benefit from these supports. Students who are not diagnosed, who are learning English as an additional language, who have additional learning challenges and even students who have a visual preference over auditory, benefit from designing learning for variability.

Why these adjustments matter for ADHD learners

ADHD is not a lack of ability.

It is a difference in how attention, working memory, and regulation operate.

This means that before a student even begins a task, they may already be:

• holding multiple instructions in working memory

• filtering competing sensory input

• regulating impulses and movement

• trying to predict what comes next

When the structure of a task is unclear, overly complex and the result can be open ended, the cognitive load increases quickly.

What looks like disengagement is often overload and a small shift in design can significantly reduce that load.

Clear written instructions

Not just spoken directions, but visible steps that students can return to without relying on memory.

Visual task breakdowns

Showing what the task looks like in stages allows students to orient themselves and reduces the pressure of holding the whole process at once.

Movement opportunities

Recognising that movement can support regulation rather than disrupt learning.

Shorter work intervals

Breaking tasks into manageable chunks helps sustain attention and builds momentum.

Predictable routines

When students know what to expect, less energy is spent on figuring out the structure and more can be directed toward learning.

These do not lowering expectations. They simply allow multiple access points for more students.

And one of the most common concerns is that adjustments like these reduce rigour.

In reality, they do the opposite.

They remove unnecessary barriers so more students can engage fully with the thinking.

The goal is not to make the work easier, simply to make the work more accessible to allow for equitable contribution.

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Why everyone benefits

Although these supports are often introduced with neurodivergent students in mind, they rarely benefit only one group.

Clear instructions help students who process language more slowly.

Visual supports help multilingual learners.

Structured routines support anxious students.

Movement benefits anyone whose energy fluctuates throughout the day.

When classrooms are designed with flexibility, more students can participate without needing individual adaptations.

What we need is a shift in perspective. Supporting ADHD learners is not about adding more to a teacher’s workload but about shifting how we design learning in the first place.

From reactive to proactive.

From individual fixes to inclusive design.

Small adjustments, when applied consistently, can change how a student experiences the entire school day.

And for some students, those adjustments are the difference between feeling overwhelmed…

and feeling capable.

ADHD parenting (and educating) isn’t chaos.

It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

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“Needs to focus.”

“Not organized.”

“Not working to potential.”

For many ADHD parents, reading these comments on their child’s report card brings a familiar and uncomfortable feeling.

It is rarely just about the child.

It is about recognition.

Because those same phrases once appeared on their own report cards, written in red pen or typed neatly into a comments box that seemed small at the time but carried surprising weight.

Anyone else dread report card day or parent-teacher conferences?

ADHD parenting has a way of reopening experiences many adults thought they had already moved past. When the words appear again, this time attached to your child, the reaction can feel stronger than expected.

Part of that reaction comes from love and protection.

Part of it comes from memory.

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You can read more about deferred shame here ⬇️

When a Comment Feels Personal

When a teacher writes “careless mistakes,” they are usually describing something they see regularly in the classroom. Work may be rushed, details overlooked, or instructions only partially followed.

For a parent with ADHD, however, those words often land differently (for a child with ADHD, they begin to believe it is their identity).

They can sound less like observation and more like judgment, especially if the same phrase appeared repeatedly in their own childhood.

A report card comment might look like a simple description of behaviour, yet it can quietly activate years of remembered frustration, moments of trying hard and still being told that the effort wasn’t visible enough.

My own report cards often highlighted the things I was good at, but in ways that the school system didn’t quite know what to do with, and not in a positive way. I was too curious, too funny, too distracting, too talkative, too daydreamy. Those same traits were the reason I excelled in hands-on subjects like Biology and Chemistry, but they also made it nearly impossible for me to engage with subjects like Math or Physics. I simply couldn’t find the interest as there was no novelty.

The result is that parents sometimes react to these comments with an emotional intensity that surprises them. Not just because the teacher might be seeing things from a different angle, but because the words carry history.

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What These Comments Are Actually Describing

Most of the phrases that appear on report cards for ADHD students are not descriptions of character. They are descriptions of executive function challenges, often described with a negative twist.

Executive functions are the mental processes that help us plan, organize, regulate attention, and manage tasks from beginning to end.

And this part matters: these challenges are skills. Skills can be supported, developed, and taught.

When a report card says a student is:

• Not organized, it is often pointing to challenges with planning, materials management, or sequencing steps.

• Making careless mistakes, might reflect working memory limits or attention shifting too quickly between tasks.

• Needs to focus, is usually describing differences in attention regulation.

• Not working to potential, often means the child’s thinking ability is stronger than their current executive systems allow them to demonstrate consistently.

These are not moral or character traits. They are brain-based skills that develop gradually and can be supported.

Understanding that difference can completely change how a parent interprets what they are reading and can open an important dialogue with teachers.

When Parenting Reopens Your Own School Story

There is another layer that makes report cards particularly emotional for ADHD parents.

When your child struggles with the same patterns you once struggled with, it can feel as if your own childhood is playing out again in real time.

Parents often find themselves thinking things like:

I don’t want them to feel the way I felt.

I don’t want school to become the place where they start believing something is wrong with them.

This protective instinct is powerful, and it is understandable.

Sometimes this overlap between past and present creates what psychologists call deferred shame, old feelings resurfacing strongly in the body in response to a current situation.

It can make the moment feel bigger than it actually is.

Recognizing that dynamic can help parents step back and respond with more clarity and begin to advocate for their child’s needs.

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Shifting the Conversation

One of the most helpful reframes for ADHD families is to treat report card comments as information rather than identity statements.

Instead of hearing “careless mistakes” as a character flaw, it becomes a signal that the child may need support with checking systems or pacing.

Instead of “not organized,” it becomes an opportunity to build external structures that reduce the mental load.

The goal is not to argue with teachers or dismiss the feedback. It is to interpret the feedback through the lens of how ADHD brains work and perhaps to share this understanding with the teaching team.

After receiving a few comments on recent report cards about challenges with planning ahead, we introduced something at home called the CEO of the Week system.

Both of my kids needed a way to see their week clearly: assignments, deadlines, and everything else happening around them. On Sundays, each of them presents their upcoming week to me as if they are the CEO of a company. Sometimes they even dress the part with a top hat making several appearances.

They walk me through what’s due, how they plan to approach it, and what might get in the way. Then they field questions.

Because their current challenge is planning and organization, visually mapping out the week has helped them think ahead in a way that simply hearing reminders never did.

This kind of shift moves the conversation away from blame and toward skill-building.

And that is where meaningful change tends to happen.

When Parents Understand, Children Feel It

Children are extremely sensitive to how adults interpret their struggles.

If a parent reads a report card comment and immediately hears criticism, the child often absorbs that tension. If the parent instead sees the comment as information about how the brain works, the tone of the conversation changes.

Instead of:

“Why do you keep making these mistakes?”

The conversation becomes:

“What might help your brain catch these next time?”

“What could you try differently next time?”

“You need to finish this by next week. When do you think it would fit best into your schedule?”

That difference may seem small, but it changes how a child experiences learning. It also brings them into the process of solving the problem.

Over time, these small shifts shape whether a student sees school as a place where they are constantly falling short or as a place where they are developing skills.

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Seeing the Comment Differently

Report card comments like “needs to focus” or “not working to potential” can sting, especially when they echo a parent’s own school experiences.

Yet when we look more closely, many of these comments are simply describing executive function differences that were not widely understood in earlier generations.

Today, we know far more about how attention, working memory, and regulation develop. That knowledge should change how we interpret behaviour and how we support students.

Teachers play a powerful role here. Words matter. The way feedback is framed can shape how a child understands their own abilities.

When parents bring a deeper understanding of neurobiology into the conversation, the report card stops being a verdict.

It becomes a starting point to advocacy.

And that shift helps ensure that a child’s identity is shaped by their strengths and possibilities rather than by a handful of familiar phrases.

ADHD parenting (and educating) isn’t chaos.

It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.

They are managing their brain.

From the outside, the classroom looks straightforward. Students sit at desks, follow instructions, complete tasks, and move from subject to subject. For many children this rhythm becomes familiar and manageable.

For ADHD students, however, the day often requires a continuous layer of invisible effort that runs alongside the learning itself.

Before the actual work even begins, the brain is already regulating.

It is holding instructions in working memory. It is stopping impulses and trying to appear focused. It is working hard at trying not to be “too much.”

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1. The Working Memory Juggle

Many ADHD students are not simply completing the assignment in front of them. They are also managing the constant background activity of their nervous system and attention.

A teacher might give three instructions in quick succession with other dialogue thrown in the mix.

“OK class. Open your notebook. Peter, stop doing that. Go sit by the window. Elizabeth, can you please put your phone away. Write the heading and… Sara, are you listening? Eyes on the board please. Answer questions one through five.”

For some students, those steps stay neatly lined up in working memory and additional information can be filtered away easily. For an ADHD brain, each instruction competes with other incoming information that is not just coming from the teacher: the buzzing of the iPad charging cart, the kid at the next table tapping his shoe on the chair, a sudden thought like don’t forget your lunchbox again, or a worry about something that happened earlier on the football field.

By the time the student starts, one, if not more of the steps may already be gone.

Not because they weren’t listening, but because their brain is juggling more pieces than it can comfortably hold.

Many ADHD adults remember this feeling from school, listening carefully, trying to follow every instruction, and still starting and unsure what the first step was supposed to be.

I remember my oldest once telling me that he tries so hard to listen to the teacher’s instructions, but by the time the teacher reaches instruction three he has already forgotten instruction one. Add to that an additional barrier to task initiate and the whole process can come to a halt.

When I asked if he could advocate for himself and ask the teacher to clarify, he surprised me.

“I do ask,” he said.

“They think I didn’t understand, so when they repeat the instruction they add more detail. And that just makes it worse.”

I recognized this pattern in myself too. From that day forward, I made sure my instructions were available in multiple formats, spoken, written on the board, and sometimes recorded as audio so students could listen back.

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2. The Energy It Takes to Hold Back

Impulses also require constant management. Many ADHD students experience a strong urge to think quickly, move, speak, or react.

In a classroom environment where stillness and quiet are often expected and encouraged as a way to manage classroom behavior, this means the child is frequently holding themselves back.

That takes a lot of energy. The effort to remain seated. The effort to wait before speaking. The effort to pause when the brain wants to act immediately, perhaps because they have already identified the issue or imagined a completely different way of solving the problem.

These are acts of self-regulation that adults often interpret as simple expectations rather than significant cognitive work.

3. The Effort to Belong

At the same time, many ADHD children are also trying very hard to belong.

They are often remarkably good at recognizing patterns in a classroom: who behaves, who doesn’t; who finishes first, who struggles; who the teacher favors and who they don’t. Matching the pace and tone of the room becomes a constant hypervigilant protective strategy.

Even small differences can feel magnified.

An ADHD child who finishes early because their brain moves quickly may hear that they rushed and were careless. An ADHD child who finishes late may feel they are slow or falling behind.

Over time, this constant comparison can make school feel less like a place of learning and more like a place of performance.

And once a child starts performing instead of learning, curiosity quietly disappears.

I remember teaching four- and five-year-olds in England when I first began teaching. At the time I knew very little about inclusion, unfortunately it wasn’t part of the training I received, and I grouped students into low, middle, and high groups.

One day I accidentally gave the wrong worksheet to a table. A child who, with hindsight, I would now recognize as having ADHD looked at me and said:

“Wrong table, Miss. The kids who finish hard work are over there.”

He was four.

Why the Crash Happens After School

My youngest once arrived home from school and struggled for a long time to take off one of his shoes. He kept trying but couldn’t quite get his finger in the back to pull it off.

He tried kicking it off and then he burst into tears.

Tears. For. Days.

I sat him on my lap and waited for the tears to settle. Eventually I said, “That must be a very stubborn shoe.”

He looked at me and said:

“No, Mummy. My t-shirt just feels so itchy. It’s felt itchy all day.”

All of this invisible effort, including sensory regulation such as bright lights, background noise, and uncomfortable clothing, happens before we even consider the academic work itself.

Which is why many ADHD children arrive home completely depleted.

Parents often only witness the collapse that follows.

A child who seemed relatively fine at school suddenly melts down at home. Homework becomes overwhelming. Small requests trigger large emotional responses. This can be confusing, especially when teachers report that the child ‘was fine’ at school.

But when you view the day through the lens of nervous system regulation, the pattern begins to make sense.

For hours the child has been regulating attention, behaviour, emotion, and sensory input in an environment that requires constant self-monitoring.

By the time they reach the safety of home, the nervous system finally releases the pressure it has been holding all day.

For many ADHD adults, school wasn’t the place where they learned they were capable. It was the place where they first learned they were “too much,” “too messy,” or “not trying hard enough.”

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Making the Invisible Visible

What looks like an overreaction is often exhaustion.

Not physical exhaustion, but cognitive, sensory and emotional depletion.

Understanding this invisible effort changes how we interpret behaviour. It shifts the question from Why are they reacting like this? to How much energy have they already spent today just holding it together?

When adults begin to see the work that ADHD students are doing internally, a different kind of support becomes possible support that reduces the load rather than increasing the pressure.

Because when effort becomes visible, children no longer have to carry it alone.

And that is where inclusion truly begins.

ADHD parenting (and educating) isn’t chaos.

It’s brain science you haven’t been taught yet.