When You and Your Child Both Have ADHD – Introduction
It often starts with your child. A teacher raises a concern. An assessment reveals ADHD. You sit in the feedback session, listening to the psychologist describe the symptoms, and something unexpected happens. You stop hearing your child’s story and start hearing your own.
The difficulty concentrating. The emotional intensity. The lifelong feeling of being out of step with everyone around you. The decades of compensating, masking, and wondering why everything felt harder for you than it seemed to be for everyone else.
This is one of the most common paths into adult ADHD awareness. ADHD is one of the most heritable neurodevelopmental conditions, with genetic factors accounting for approximately 70-80% of the risk. When a child is diagnosed, the chances of at least one parent sharing the trait are significant. And for many parents, especially mothers who were never assessed, this moment is both illuminating and overwhelming.
The Emotional Complexity of a Shared Diagnosis
Discovering that you and your child share ADHD is rarely a simple moment of recognition. It opens up layers of emotion that can take time to process.
There may be relief: finally understanding why you struggled at school, why relationships have been difficult, why you have always felt like you were working twice as hard for half the result. There may be grief: for the younger version of yourself who didn’t get the support your child is now receiving. And there may be guilt: the quiet fear that you “passed this on” to your child, or that your own unmanaged symptoms have already affected your parenting.
All of these feelings are valid. None of them are facts about your worth as a parent. ADHD is a neurological difference with a strong genetic component. You did not choose it for yourself, and you did not choose it for your child. What you can choose is how you respond now that you know.
Parenting With ADHD: The Unique Challenges
Parenting is an exercise in executive function: managing schedules, maintaining routines, regulating your emotions while your child is dysregulated, staying consistent with boundaries, remembering school lunches and homework and swimming lessons and medication. For a parent with ADHD, this list is not just demanding. It is neurologically adversarial.
You may find yourself:
- Struggling to maintain the consistent routines your child needs, while your own brain craves novelty and resists structure
- Becoming emotionally reactive when your child pushes back, because your own emotional regulation is already stretched thin
- Feeling overwhelmed by the administrative load of parenting: forms, appointments, meal plans, school communication
- Experiencing intense guilt when you lose patience, forget something important, or feel like you are failing at the very thing that matters most
- Running on quiet burnout yourself. You may be experiencing what many clinicians now call quiet burnout, and it is closely linked to a pattern known as ADHD masking
The painful irony is that the parent who understands their ADHD child most deeply is often the one who finds the practical demands of parenting most difficult.
How Therapy Supports the Whole Family
When ADHD runs in the family, individual therapy is important, but it is rarely sufficient on its own. The most effective approach addresses the family system.
1. Processing Your Own Diagnosis. Before you can support your child effectively, you need space to process what this means for you. Therapy provides that space: to grieve what was missed, to rewrite the self-critical narratives you have been carrying, and to build a more compassionate understanding of your own story.
2. Learning to Parent With Your Brain, Not Against It. Generic parenting advice often fails ADHD parents because it assumes a level of executive function they don’t have. In therapy, we develop strategies that are realistic for your brain: visual systems instead of mental checklists, external reminders instead of relying on memory, and self-compassion practices for the days when things fall apart.
3. Understanding Your Child Through Your Own Experience. Your ADHD gives you a unique window into what your child is feeling. Therapy helps you use that insight constructively, meeting your child with empathy while maintaining the structure they need to thrive. Your children also have incredible gifts: creativity, problem solving, passion, and resilience. Understanding your own neurodivergence helps you recognise and nurture those gifts.
4. Breaking Generational Patterns. Many ADHD parents grew up in environments that did not understand or accommodate their needs. Therapy helps you identify the patterns you inherited and consciously choose different ones for your own family.
When You and Your Child Both Have ADHD – What I Offer as a Therapist
I work with parents, teens, and families navigating ADHD together. In my practice, I provide:
- Individual counselling for parents processing their own ADHD alongside their child’s.
- Support in developing parenting strategies that work with the ADHD brain.
- A compassionate space to address the guilt, grief, and overwhelm of parenting with ADHD.
- Teen counselling for young people navigating their own neurodivergent identity.
SADAG provides family mental health resources and referrals across South Africa.
Conclusion
ADHD in your family is not a burden to be managed. It is a shared language, one that, with the right support, can become a source of understanding, connection, and even humour.
You are not a bad parent. You are a neurodivergent parent doing an extraordinarily demanding job with a brain that was never designed for checklists. And the fact that you are reading this, trying to understand, trying to do better, is all the evidence you need that your child is in good hands.
About Paula Marais
I’m Paula Marais, a registered specialist wellness counsellor based in Claremont, Cape Town. I hold an Honours degree in Psychology from Unisa and a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from UCT, and I am registered with the ASCHP. I offer individual and couples counselling, both in person and online, because I believe online sessions are equally as effective as meeting face to face.
If you and your child are both navigating ADHD, I’d love to support you. There’s no pressure. I’m just a WhatsApp away on 072 633 7661, or you can email me at info@paulamaraistherapy.com.
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