Back to School When Mom and Kids Have ADHD

Monday was the first day of school! My youngest is still at home, but I have 3 school-aged children, so the house is much quieter than what I’m used to. I love it!

This is the first school year since I began effective treatment for my ADHD (meds and coaching,) and I’m so excited for the relief that has given me. I’ve had years and years of mom guilt, because I have never been good at keeping on top of all the moving pieces involved with school. I constantly felt unprepared and then felt guilty when my children would have to deal with the consequences. I wanted to do better, I didn’t want to let them down. But I literally didn’t know how.

Things are SO different this year! I now understand how my brain works. I know I’m not going to remember to fill out that form and send it in later, I have to use a system to remind me. I know that I won’t check the girls book bags before the end of the night, I need to do it as soon as they walk through the door. (This has always been one of my biggest pitfalls, the idea that there’s plenty of time, so it can wait. Inevitably I forget that it needs to be done, or get distracted doing other things. Just do it now! Or set up a reminder if it really can be done later.) 

This year I’m really trying to think ahead and so far so good. We got school supplies at the last minute, but this year I actually went through the supplies we already had and was able to cut the list in half. I’ve gone back to school shopping plenty of times where I spent a lot more money than I needed to, because I couldn’t be bothered to look through what we already had. It always felt too overwhelming! But this year I did it, and we saved a lot of money. 

Last night the girls picked out their outfits and had all of their stuff ready to go, which led to a stress-free morning. This is often something we’ve done for the first day, but I’m really going to push them to do it every night. Mornings can be rough for my house full of ADHD night owls! Let’s make things as easy as possible.

I’m using Asana to keep information, due dates, etc… organized, and that is something that will be changed and tweaked as the year goes on. After all, I’m still figuring this out! I might also keep things in my bullet journal. Maybe that will feel redundant, but that’s something I need, because I never know which system I’m actually going to be interested in at any given time! The point is, I’m committed to doing better. That means checking in with my system to make sure it’s working. It also means that when things do fall through the cracks, I have to figure out how I can prevent it from happening again. Because let’s face it, things aren’t going to be perfect, mistakes are going to happen. But if I can learn from those mistakes, I can feel good about my efforts to be a better mom.

I’ve also started to develop a plan for homework, because that’s never been great in our house. It’s one of those things that we never feel like doing, so I want us to tackle it immediately after school. I’ve realized one of the things I struggle with is helping my children transition. If they get home and all go off to do their own thing, I know they’ll have trouble getting started on homework. I’ll anticipate the whining, and I’ll subconsciously decide it’s not worth it. They’ll either come to me at the last minute freaking out that they have homework to do, or it just won’t get done. Not this year! Homework will be an after school activity, because then we really can be free for the rest of the evening. And I know I will struggle even more to get them to do it later on.

Today is the 3rd day of school, and we’ve already had a big failure, but were able to make it work. I could not wake myself up this morning, it might have been from allergies, and taking Benadryl the night before. I’m not sure, but I kept falling back to sleep. For some reason my two middle daughters decided to sleep in the living room, after I had already gone to bed and thought they were sleeping in their beds. This led to them not hearing the music playing on the Alexa in their bedroom. I think my oldest might have woken up shortly before us and was mostly ready when I woke up. But being inattentive ADHD, I don’t even think it occurred to her that she should wake us up. 

With 15 minutes to get ready, I jumped into action. When I was growing up, this was always how I got ready for the day. I waited until the very last minute and then quickly got ready and ran out the door, so I am comfortable with these types of scenarios. But my second daughter…. oh my second daughter, she does not do well with this type of situation at all. She hates to be rushed and then shuts down. Which is so frustrating as a mom! But knowing this about her, I was very mindful of how I approached things this morning. In the past, I would have spent all morning angrily lecturing, myself and my girls, about how things should have gone in the morning and assigning any blame possible. I think a lot of this comes from guilt and deflecting, and it’s just not useful. I caught myself doing that very thing, and then I stopped and thought, “I do not have time for this.” 

I continued working with my second daughter, as daughters one and three were doing fine getting ready on their own. I tried my hardest to keep things positive, which can be hard when you’re feeling that pressure. But I knew as soon as I took things negative, it was just going to make everything harder for both of us. I’m not entirely sure how, but we made it out the door and got the girls to school on time! Daughter two did forget her water bottle, which she needed since Covid=no drinking fountain use, but my husband was able to run it to the school. I also forgot to give them their stickers this morning that say their name/grade/teacher, but I’m sure they made it to their classrooms okay. All in all, something that could have ruined the day, turned out just fine. It’s experiences like this one that really show me how much I’ve grown, and how possible it is to do better this year. And you better believe I’ll be setting up some extra alarms on every device in the house!

I hope no matter what method of schooling you have chosen this year, that you can start things off on a great foot and feel on top of things! I created a guide for Virtual School Troubleshooting that might be able to help with the process of actually getting schoolwork done. And although it was created with virtual school in mind, it could be helpful for homework struggles, too! You can grab that here!

Good luck this year!