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Parenting can trigger unresolved childhood wounds, not just reactions to our child’s behavior in the moment.

Parents, especially those with ADHD, may misinterpret ordinary defiance as personal failure due to past shame.

Healing happens when parents become aware of old patterns and intentionally choose new responses.

Have you ever found yourself reacting to your child in a way that surprised you?

Your daughter refuses to get dressed for school, and you find yourself feeling overwhelmed and defeated. Your son rolls his eyes when you ask him to put away his phone, and it leaves you questioning whether he respects you at all. Or perhaps your child melts down over something seemingly minor, and although the situation was resolved within minutes, you carry the emotional weight of it for the rest of the day.

Every parent has moments like these. Parenting is demanding, unpredictable, and emotionally taxing. For parents with ADHD, however, the challenges can feel even greater. Staying organized while managing a household, tolerating constant interruptions, regulating your own emotions while helping your child regulate theirs, and navigating the sensory demands of family life can leave even the most loving ADHD parent exhausted and depleted.

Yet over the years, both in my clinical practice and in my research, I have started thinking differently about these moments. Sometimes the intensity of our emotional reactions has surprisingly little to do with what our child has just done. Rather, it reflects the meaning our brain has attached to that behavior.

I was reminded of this recently while interviewing ADHD coach and father of two, Clay Gill. We talked about executive functioning, emotional regulation, and the everyday realities of raising children when your own brain works differently. As the interview unfolded, I noticed that we kept returning to his childhood (I find many parenting stories lead here).

Clay described becoming a father as one of the experiences that finally brought his ADHD “front and center.” Like many adults who are diagnosed later in life, Clay had spent years honing ways to compensate for his difficulties, but parenthood changed that. Under the relentless cognitive and emotional demands of raising........

© Psychology Today