ADHD and Parenting: When You and Your Child Both Have ADHD
It was 7:42 AM. You needed to leave in three minutes. Your kid had lost one shoe, couldn't find their backpack, and had just decided this was the perfect moment to explain the entire plot of a video game. And you — a person who also cannot find things and is also running late — were trying very hard not to explode.
If you're an adult with ADHD raising a child with ADHD, you already know: the usual parenting advice wasn't written for you. "Be consistent." "Set clear routines." "Stay calm." These suggestions are delivered with the assumption that the parent has reliable access to the executive function, emotional regulation, and organizational capacity those strategies require. When both parent and child have ADHD, the gap between advice and reality can feel enormous.
This post is for those families.
The Unique Challenges of Neurodivergent Parenting
Parenting a child with ADHD is already demanding. The child needs more scaffolding, more patience, more creative problem-solving, more emotional attunement during dysregulation than neurotypical children typically do. The research is clear on this — ADHD children benefit enormously from parents who can stay regulated themselves, provide predictable structure, and respond to their emotional intensity with warmth rather than escalation.
When the parent also has ADHD, some of those capacities are harder to access consistently. Not impossible — but harder. ADHD parents may struggle with:
Maintaining the consistent routines that ADHD children depend on, when their own executive function runs inconsistently
Staying regulated during their child's meltdowns — especially when both are dysregulated simultaneously
Following through on consequences, or remembering what consequence they agreed on
The particular shame that comes from recognizing your own struggles in your child — and not knowing whether that helps or hurts
What Goes Well (That Nobody Talks About)
There is a flip side that doesn't get enough attention: ADHD parents of ADHD children often have something that neurotypical parents sometimes don't.
They understand. Not theoretically — viscerally. They know what it feels like to lose a thought mid-sentence, to freeze at the start of a task, to feel overwhelmed by what everyone else finds simple. This understanding, when it can be accessed, is a gift. It means less judgment, more flexibility, and a greater capacity for genuine empathy in the moments when the child most needs it.
The challenge is accessing that understanding when you're also dysregulated. That's the work.
Strategies That Work Across ADHD Brains
Because both parent and child share some of the same neurological profile, certain strategies tend to work well for the family system as a whole:
External structure that neither has to maintain internally: visual schedules, posted routines, alarms and reminders — things the environment holds so neither brain has to
Transition warnings: both ADHD brains struggle with sudden transitions. "In 10 minutes we're going" prevents the crisis that comes from "we're leaving now"
Co-regulation before problem-solving: when your child is dysregulated, they cannot hear problem-solving. First, regulate together — then talk about what happened
Repair without shame: ADHD parents and ADHD children both make mistakes and both lose it sometimes. Modelling repair — "I got too loud earlier and I'm sorry, let's try again" — is one of the most valuable things you can do
Working with your own ADHD: the more resourced your own nervous system is, the more you have to give. Your treatment is part of your child's treatment
Try This: The ADHD Parent's Triage Question
In the hot moments — when your child is escalating and you can feel your own system activating — pause for one second and ask yourself: "Does this need to happen now, or am I reacting to my own dysregulation?"
Many of the power struggles that escalate in ADHD families are not actually about the thing they appear to be about. They're about two dysregulated nervous systems colliding. The shoe, the backpack, the video game — in five minutes, none of these will matter. What matters in that moment is whether you can regulate enough to avoid damage that takes hours to repair.
Asking the triage question doesn't always produce calm. But it creates a beat of reflection — and that beat is often enough to choose a different response.
Support for the Whole Family System
At Feel Your Way Therapy, our 14-session Family ADHD Program is designed with the whole family system in mind — not just the child's behaviour, but the parent's experience, the family dynamics, and the specific challenges of neurodivergent parenting.
We work with registered psychotherapists who understand ADHD from the inside, and we take seriously the reality that parenting with ADHD is a distinct experience that standard parent resources don't address well.
If you're a parent with ADHD raising a child with ADHD in Toronto, book a free consultation and let's talk about what support could look like for your whole family.
