My husband walked into my office, took one look at the explosion of papers surrounding me, and asked, “What the **** happened in here?” There I was, sitting on the floor poring over every study and article I could find on how Adult ADHD affects parenting (all in preparation for presenting on the topic at the CADDAC conference on ADHD in Toronto May 30-31). With all the various angles and possibilities to cover — ADHD is no one-size-fits-all condition, after all — it felt very overwhelming.
A few days later, with the presentation finally Powerpointed, I met a 40-something mother who also felt overwhelmed — by living the topic I’d only been writing about. Definitely more challenging!. This top-of-her-class attorney had adjusted fairly well to her first child’s arrival some seven years ago. Four years later came her second daughter, the sweet-faced little spitfire whose photo she proudly shared with me from her iPhone. That’s when this stay-at-home mom’s organizing skills — tenuous, even at times humorous, since childhood — hit the skids.
Setting off on her errands after dropping the oldest at school, she’d often find herself inexplicably off-course. Instead of mailing items at the post office and grocery-shopping, she was sipping lattes and cruising the toy-store aisles. At first she attributed her distractability to being overwhelmed with the responsibilities of raising a family. “But honestly, ” she said, “plenty of other mothers are doing much more, and with less stress, it seems.”
She’d also noticed that she and her husband, who’d always gotten along so well, now often squabbled. Finally, in classic ADHD inter-generational style, her daughter’s teacher mentioned a significant problem with “daydreaming” and disorganization; that prompted her husband to read up on ADHD, thus finding apt descriptions not only of his daughter’s but also his wife’s “quirky” behaviors.
“I think I’m a good mother, a very loving mother who truly enjoys her children,” she told me, “But I’m not the mom with the organized closets and the weekly meal plans. In fact, if you peeked in my closets, you’d think, ‘what is she, crazy?’” Newly dumbfounded by the recent revelations about ADHD, she wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge that it might be a problem for her. She did admit, however, she was tired of expending so much energy to get through the simplest household tasks. “And I worry,” she added, “about how I’m going to help my daughter stay organized and work with the school on helping her.”
This mom has a good foundation for tackling her challenges as well as her daughter’s — a supportive spouse, secure income, high intelligence, low defensiveness, and access to good resources. For many respondents to the ADHD Partner Survey, however, co-parenting with a partner who has late-diagnosis ADHD poses larger challenges. Like ADHD itself, the issues are all over the map. The survey looked at several aspects of co-parenting when a parent has ADHD, which we’ll explore in future posts.
For now, consider the responses to these questions in the chart below to gain a sense of some hot-button issues:
Your comments welcome.
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May 23, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Beth
I had no idea so many others had an ADHD partner who wants to be the “fun” parent and never discipline. That leaves me to be the bad guy all the time. Not fair. But even though my husband is the “fun parent,” he sometimes pushes the fun too far. The kids get wild. And then he cracks down on them. It’s confusing and hurtful for them.
January 2, 2010 at 5:51 am
Shanna
I’m wondering if the discipline difficulty is based on how hard it is for adults with ADHD to think in other than “now” time, combined with difficulty focusing on the needs of others. Beyond simply not disciplining, when I ask what my husband wants for our child in the long term and how he can contribute to that through parenting he is stumped. The idea of spending time with her doing things he is not personally interested in so he can know her better is hard.
I have been asked to contribute to treatment goals for my husband and trying to define exactly how I would like to see our situation change is really hard to define. Things like discipline seem almost like a red herring – it seems to be something even deeper that involves the executive functions that happen to make up discipline. It has to do with time other than “now” and the needs of others along with planning and follow through. We have shifted into a parent-teenager relationship which I hate. Finding my role during the drug trial phase is difficult. I think the pages around 304 in is it you me or adult add are probably where I need to be focusing my effort.