I suspect some of you may feel a tightening in your chest just reading the headline above; perhaps a memory rising of a morning that felt impossibly heavy or an evening that ended in frustrated tears.

Let me say it gently: parenting can be lonely. And while there are certainly people who go days without seeing another person – and that kind of isolation is deeply painful – there is another kind of loneliness that is far more subtle and much harder to articulate unless you have lived it.

This is the loneliness of walking into a room full of people and still feeling unseen. It is the loneliness that arises in the midst of the school runs, birthday parties and appointments, when everything you do should be visible yet somehow your inner world feels invisible.

That quiet, persistent ache is familiar to many families parenting children with SEND (special educational needs and disability), including those with ADHD, and it brings with it a form of loneliness inflected by guilt and often anxiety.

This is not an article about blame – not of children, not of parents – but about the heavy load carried when we feel ‘other’ as a parent.

Of course we feel grateful. It is true that we are lucky and that we love our children deeply. Yet we are also human, and some moments are unbearably hard, and some days exhaust us to our core.

When we don’t feel grateful in a given........

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