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Adults with ADHD can experience intense sensory distress, especially from everyday parenting noise.

Parenthood limits sensory management strategies that adults with ADHD used before having children.

Sharing sensory challenges with family and planning responses can ease parental distress.

“A baby's cry to me was so overwhelming ... it was like sensory pain.”

This is a quote from my colleague and ADHD coach, Clay Gill, during our conversation about the ins and outs of parenting with an ADHD brain. Clay explained that, before becoming a father, he had wondered whether he wanted children because he found the sound of babies crying so overwhelming. After his daughter was born, he experienced intense physical distress when she cried.

Clay described the feeling vividly: being unable to think clearly, experiencing an intenseurge to escape, and sometimes freezing or becoming very agitated.

We often think........

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