Parenting With ADHD: Why Am I the Only One Who Knows Where Everything Is?

Why does every question in the house come to me?

Jessica McCabe makes the How to ADHD videos, and she is a parent too. She says it plainly: “We are usually trying to hold way too much in our head.” The plans. The times. Where the scissors went. “The mental load is real and it’s hard,” she says. She adds that it is even harder with ADHD.

Each time someone asks, you stop what you were doing. You find the answer. Then you try to find your place again. That happens many times a day, and getting back on track is real work.

The usual advice is to get more organized. Make a better list. Try harder to remember. To us, that aims at the wrong target. The goal is not a bigger memory. It is fewer things that only you know. You aren’t broken. Your brain works differently, and it needs a setup that fits it. We wrote more about what the mental load is in another post.

How do I get the whole family out of my head?

McCabe’s answer is to “externalize more.” That means moving what you know out of your head. It goes into a place the whole family shares. Then people go there to find things, and they stop coming to you. Here is what that looks like in her house:

• One shared email for kid news. She and her partner both get every message. Nobody has to read it, sort it out, and explain it to the other.
• Bins with labels, in clear zones. Everyone knows where things go. They find the scissors without asking you. The labels help you, too.
• One family hub. A wall calendar, a whiteboard or the fridge door all work. Some families use a digital screen. Write down what is happening, what day, and where people need to be.
• A timer everyone sees. Set it for when dinner will be ready. Now the clock answers “Is dinner ready yet?” so you don’t have to.

One more move is easy to miss. Put who owns each job on the hub, too. McCabe and her partner kept trying to plan every meal for the week. Each week, they felt too overwhelmed to do it. So she stopped trying. She only needed to know who was in charge of each meal. Her partner said he figured he was handling breakfast. She had no idea. Now it is on the calendar, so they both know. Her line for all of it: “Having a household hub helps ensure that you do not become the household hub.” For more ideas like these, see six setups for adult focus.

What if I still feel like I’m carrying too much?

Then carry less. McCabe’s first tip is two words: “Do less.” Each new activity adds more than the time it takes. It adds the planning to get there and back. It adds new names to learn, and who is allergic to what. It adds jobs, and snacks to cut. She signed up for a co-op that was two hours a week. It turned into about ten hours of work. Her advice is to cut down to what matters most right now. If that is still too much, go in seasons. Do swim lessons now and gymnastics later, not both at once.

Next, rest on a schedule. Before their daughter, she and her partner could run until empty. Then they took a day to recharge. With a child, that stopped working. So now they plan rest as upkeep, before the crash. He gets an hour after work while she takes their daughter. She gets the house to herself on Sunday nights. Everyone plans around it.

Last, let other people help, and let them do it their way. If only you ever do bedtime, only you will ever get good at it. Then you never get a break, and resentment builds. Help also builds your child’s bond with the other adults in their life. In McCabe’s words, “we need the help more than we need for it to be done exactly the way that we do it.”

Start tonight with one thing. Pick the question you hear most. Put its answer somewhere the whole family sees. Then point to it the next time someone asks.