Episode 63 – Surviving the Mental Load of the School Year

Jane McFadden:

Hello and welcome back to the ADHD Mums podcast. Today we are tackling a topic that feels heavier than your child’s backpack on library day. This is surviving the mental load of the school year.

Do you feel like you are the default manager of every single detail? Class party sign up, lunch box, emails from teachers, you are not alone. The mental load isn’t just logistics, it’s relentless. The invisible tasks of keeping the entire operation running, balancing society expectations, your child’s needs and then your own sanity.

This episode is for every mum who feels like they’re juggling a million things at once. If you’re a neurodivergent mum navigating all of this, you are carrying an additional layer of complexity and I see you, it is tough. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of school year demands, whether it’s permission slips, forgotten sports uniforms, unending cycle of snacks, this episode is for you.

I remember one particular Monday morning when everything that could go wrong did. I forgot it was library day, my child’s books were still on the kitchen counter, the lunch box wasn’t packed and I’d run out of bread. And to top it off, I’d missed an email about a costume day, so I had no idea about that either. And by the time I sat in the car, I felt like I had failed even before the day had started.

But here’s the thing, that moment wasn’t about my capabilities, it was a symptom of the impossible expectations we put on ourselves to manage every single detail perfectly. From that day, I started implementing strategies that didn’t just help me survive, but also helped me get back in control of my sanity.

So why does the mental load feel so overwhelming? First off, it’s because it’s invisible. There are countless tasks that we have to juggle and it often goes unnoticed until something falls through the cracks and then all we see is our deficits instead of all of the things that did go well. It’s also disproportionate. Studies show that women, especially neurodivergent mums, carry the larger share of the load. ADHD executive function challenges add another layer of difficulty.

It’s also never-ending. The school year is relentless. There is no built-in breaks for cognitive or emotional labour it demands and school holidays can feel, depending on your setup, even harder. If you’re feeling like you’re stretched too thin, it’s not because you’re failing, it’s probably because you are stretched too thin and what you are feeling is real.

So let’s define what the mental load is. It’s not just a to-do list, it’s the cognitive labour of remembering, planning, anticipating and managing all the moving parts of a family. So how do we manage the mental load? One of the things that I really like doing is batch planning. Instead of spreading tasks out chaotically, which a lot of people do, group similar tasks together and then knock them out in one session.

So for example, on Sunday a lot of people set one hour aside to prepare lunches, lay out uniforms and review the week’s schedule. They build that in so at this time every Sunday they know they’re usually home. That is what they are doing every Sunday and they put a timer on their phone. If you are somebody that doesn’t like planning but benefits from it, you may need to put the timer in place because you may never feel like doing the plan. I never feel like doing the plan but wow the week goes better when I do do it.

And that plan isn’t just for you. If you have a partner, they need to be involved in the plan too. If we look at mental load, we need to get all of our team members involved. So if you’re the only one who knows the plan and you have all the plan in your mind and your partner does not even know what the plan is, they have absolutely no hope in helping you. So let’s brief the team on what the plan is.

If you get really fatigued by decision-making, I do. If decision-making fatigue, I find draining. But decision-heavy tasks, for example meal planning, you may want to bulk in and batch it. For example, you may create a rotating two-week menu so you know what you’re going to eat on which day.

So instead of saying to your partner or your partner says to you or you say to each other at four o’clock, what do you feel like for dinner tonight? When I get asked that question, my thought pattern is whatever I don’t have to do. Whatever is the easiest option that involves the least labour for me is what I want to do. And then you go back and forth on this decision-making thing.

I reckon creating a batch decision-making in meal planning is really helpful to eliminate the decision fatigue if that’s an issue for you. If you actually love cooking and you love thinking about what you feel like and you love stopping at the shops, not something for you to do. But a lot of us struggle to think of what to make, go and buy the things and have it already and it’s just another thing that doesn’t need to be there.

Batch that, write it down in your phone or put it on the wall or in an app for you and your partner to look at. So you don’t have that added chat every afternoon. What’s for dinner? I don’t know. What do you think? And you go back and forth. Even just breaking up that mental load. You are on cooking on these nights, I’m on cooking on these nights.

And make sure you’re also really specific. So someone’s on cooking, what does that mean? Does that mean they think of the meal, they go buy the food, they make sure it’s all there? Because if you are doing the mental load of deciding what to have, making sure the food is there and they’re only doing the cooking part, that still feels like you’ve got mental load. So you want to be freeing your brain up of things that don’t need to be there.

If your partner is on cooking or someone else is, that means that they are entirely in charge of that job. And that mental load of outsourcing different jobs to different people means that you’re still thinking about it, checking it, making sure they’ve done it, as opposed to them managing that entire task themselves.

We all know about shared family calendars. Yes, we know about apps such as GCAL and other apps. You may have a partner that won’t or can’t add to shared calendars. There are a lot of partners out there, male and female, who are just, they can’t, won’t add to it. If you have one of those, just do it visually.

Because having the mental load of somebody, kids, partners, whoever it is, of coming up to you and asking what’s on today every day, especially if you’ve got multiple children and a partner, and everybody asking you and then you having to think through your brain, it’s Tuesday, it’s dancing, it’s soccer, what do I need, blah, blah, blah. Write it down and then when they come and ask you, refer them back to the calendar.

If you can get them online, great. If you can’t, do it visually. Now, we also know that executive function can be really difficult for ADHD mums. So when we’re managing mental load, executive function, planning, prioritising, remembering is often really difficult. Let’s have a bit of a look at some things that we can do.

First off, I think time blocking is really important. So we talked before about time blocking on a Sunday, like prep for the week in a time block and that might be 30 minutes. Time blocking can be really good for tasks like, for example, the washing. You may put on an episode of something that you really like and you just do all of the folding on a Wednesday and then all of the folding on a Friday and you time block it so you’re doing all of it whilst you’re watching something.

That may be a lot more pleasurable and you can put a timer in your phone as opposed to doing folding every day, five to 10 minutes and then never really finishing it and then just feeling overwhelmed like you’re constantly folding. I find time blocking for folding washing really helpful. If you have a podcast you like, i.e. this one, that would be great.

I would put a podcast on, I try and keep the episodes to 30 minutes and do something for 30 minutes. So this entire podcast episode, I am going to just do washing, I am just going to do meal prep and try and keep the tasks that are quite mindless going with something going on in your brain. Otherwise it’s really boring.

We also want to make the most of momentum. So sometimes we are in movement and sometimes we are not. So we want to make sure that when we’re in momentum we are doing things that are important and when we are not in momentum we may need to give ourselves a break.

For example, if you suddenly have this productivity drive where you think you can do stuff, have your list ready of the most important tasks, you might want to use a to-do app, you might want to go onto my ADHD planner on the website. It’s www.adhdmums.com.au. There’s a really great planner in there where you can have your priorities written out. So if you have a really big thrive of momentum, something comes to your body like, wow, I’m actually like feeling like I can do stuff.

You want to make sure that you’re using that energy on things that are important, not on other things. So it’s not good when you’re feeling productive to then go and try and make a plan because you might use all of your productive energy just making the plan. So have the plan ready and when productivity strikes you, you’re just like ready to go.

And then the step on from that is to break a large overwhelming task into something smaller. So for example, if one of your tasks is organise school supplies, you need to be really clear that step one is to put all of the things in your house, all the stationery into one area. Step two might be to categorise into child and who is having what. Step three might be label.

So when we’re going organise school supplies, we may be doing all of it but none of it and then the job never gets finished. If you’ve got a large job that you find really difficult but you have to get done, you may need to get a friend, family member, like I’ll come to your house, you come to mine, let’s get this done together. Or even a child, like I will try and get one of my kids to do something near me while I’m doing something that I really don’t like. Then it feels like I’ve got someone with me during it.

One thing that’s been really life-changing for me is automation. Now we know that we should automate everything that we can but we rarely have enough time to do it and it’s this like never getting ahead that I think with school is really tough. For example, when I started to actually get ahead of it and plan instead of just reacting to every crisis, I actually started to make headway. But when you’re in crisis midway through a school term and someone says why don’t you just automate everything, it’s like yeah but I don’t have time to go to the toilet.

I am in crisis. Going through my bank statements and figuring out how to do direct debits is not in the realms of my possibilities at this moment. For example, if you are waiting for your credit card to actually expire and the card no doubt will be sent to the wrong address, you won’t be able to find it and then you’ll be unable to pay for anything for a week whilst a new card comes. God that happens to me every time.

So you don’t want to listen to this episode and then think yeah I’ll do that later and then get three weeks into the school term and then you won’t have any time to do the automation. So we want to be doing automations wherever we can. For example, you might be thinking what do you mean? You might want to sign up for auto pay for school fees. You might want to do regular reminders for permission slips.

You might need to do like an auto pay if you use a school canteen quite often. You might need to do a subscription service for like lunchbox staples. So for example, you might have an online delivery of food of everything that you know that you need every week and it just comes from whatever supermarket is your favourite on the same day and time every week on automation.

You may also want to, for example, buy extra uniforms. That’s like an automation process for me. I don’t just buy two polos because there’s no way I do the washing that often and there’s no way that I can keep track and my kids are very specific. They won’t wear each other’s polo shirts even though they’re exactly the same and one size different.

So I know I’m going to need extra uniforms. That extra expense seems like nothing in the time when I’m running around trying to find a uniform and we’re really late. So I know the investment in uniform is going to be worth it. If you know that you have an area that you struggle with, for me washing and having clean polos, anticipate that now.

If you have been one of those people where your electricity has been turned off because you don’t pay your electricity, just set up that direct debit. It’s not about sitting down and isolating three hours and being like I will automate my entire life now. No, no. I’m talking about getting a bill and taking two minutes and this is much easier with ADHD medication because without ADHD medication I leave everything and I don’t do any of the two-minute jobs and then I have a thousand of them. Little shitty jobs that I can’t do.

So if something is under two minutes, just try and do it in the moment. Try and take the two minutes that it would take to get the job done in the automation wherever you can. All I do is just have a stack of things that eventually I need to change the addresses on. Every now and again I just do a couple because I’m never going to have six hours to do all of them and waiting for me to have six hours to update my address is never going to happen.

Research shows us that externalising tasks with automation and visual reminders reduces the working memory strain. If you feel like your head is really full, it probably is. So make it easier for yourself by reducing what’s in your brain and one of the ways to do that is to, as I spoke about earlier, if you have someone that’s helping you or a partner or a family member, give them the whole job, not parts of it.

So if you have cooking dinner every night in your mind, you’re thinking about it all day, that you have a partner that cooks part of the week, you let him know or her know. On these days, that is your job entirely. So you’re not holding everything in your head and then divvying out jobs. You’re giving part of that mental load away.

If you have a grandparent or somebody that picks up your child on the Friday, for example, and they have a partner or another family member, you may say to them on the Friday, if you’re not able to pick him up, can you please just contact my sister directly and ask her to do it rather than contacting me and then getting me to ask my sister. Try and see where you can, in your life, remove the part where the information comes through you.

Because for me, that’s part of the anxieties. I feel like I have to check my phone because a lot of people talk through me instead of directly to each other and that can be a little bit reflection of my perfectionism or me being a bit controlling or a little bit stressed, anxiety around my children and having things right, air quoting right. But have a bit of a look at what you can let go of because what you’ll find is you’ll have less in your brain.

The other thing that’s important to mention is that some of this mental load is about, for me anyways, about societal expectations. I feel like the mental load is amplified by pressures to be perfect, the perfect mum. We have to talk about setting boundaries and what success actually looks like for us.

Now, I can’t not mention my ADHD planner and values workshop here because it strips back what is in your brain what you should do versus what’s actually important to you and that is really important to have a look at because if we are trying to do everything and a lot of the things aren’t even important to us, we will be burnt out and exhausted and we will never get to what we actually want to do.

We need to have a look at, for example, learning to say no. Now, that is a really difficult one. Go back to my people-pleasing episode that I have. It’ll be in the show notes, the people-pleasing episode that is out in December. It’s got a little bit of Christmas theme to it but it’s very relevant and it gives you scripting on people-pleasing.

Just as a quick recap, saying no is a skill and it is not a failure if you find that hard. It’s not a failure if you do say no. You can’t volunteer for every committee. You can’t volunteer for everything at school. I think a lot of these school canteens, for example, were built on the idea that there were stay-at-home mums.

There’s not that many stay-at-home mums personally that I see that actually have that much spare time. Because we can work from home now, a lot of us will work part-time from home or we’ll work in our partner’s business, for example, so we’re not really, if you actually strip it back, when someone says they’re a stay-at-home mum, I don’t actually don’t know that many. They’re actually free from nine till three.

Don’t put pressure on yourself to volunteer as if you are a stay-at-home mum if you are not one. But, and the Values Workbook will show you this, because if volunteering at school is actually really important to you, then you should make room for it. But only if you want to and it’s actually important to you because we can’t do everything.

I really love some of the research around good enough parenting. Now good enough parenting is a concept that was started by Dr Donald Winnicott in the 1950s. That’s how long it’s been around for. Now Dr Winnicott found that meeting a child’s needs just 30% of the time is sufficient to create a happy, well-attached child. And doing it that way actually boosts their resilience.

Now, I do have a bit of a laugh because that was in the 50s and obviously parenting has changed a little bit since then, but the research still stands. If you are there with your child 30% of the time and you are present 30% of the time, the research actually shows that that’s good enough. So if you are only there, and I’m air quoting only, if you are only there for your child 80% of the time and you missed a few things, I’m pretty sure you’re well ahead of where most other people are. It’s okay to let some things go.

If we attend to every single one of our child’s needs constantly, one, we would be absolutely exhausted and two, we would probably still feel the mum guilt, so we’d never really feel like we’ve done it perfectly, and three, we may actually not need to do that. Depending on the way that you like to parent and who your child is and who you are and what your setup is, I think 30% is good to aim for. We don’t need to be flawless. We don’t need to be perfect.

We also need to advocate for shared responsibility. The mental load of school is really hard. For example, pushing back against the assumption that mums handle it all. It does really shit me when the teacher doesn’t say anything about anything when your partner picks up the child, but then when you’re there, suddenly they’ve got lots to say, or maybe they’ve just seen your partner, you’ve been at work, and then you cop an email and they want to have a meeting and you’re like, why did you not just talk to my partner who was right there?

And I know that that’s part of society and also I feel like as well sometimes teachers find the parent that they know is going to be most responsive, most helpful, and a lot of the time, I’m sorry to say it, that is the mum. Or maybe, for example, the information doesn’t get passed on by the partner or the grandparent or whoever it is. It doesn’t have to be a gender thing. So they wait for the mum because that’s where they have the relationship. That can happen too.

But if you’re doing emails to the school, you may have to say to your partner, hey, can you manage the bedtime because I’ve got to do emails to the school? Can you do the morning routine because I actually have to get all these permission slips done? If you are wondering about mental load and you’d love to play the game with your partner, there is a mental load game. I played it with my partner. Now, your partner can feel like it’s a trap where you’re going to give them more jobs.

It’s actually not about that. It’s about freeing up both of your mind. If you’re both thinking about dinner and then you’re working on it together after the school run with the kids there and it feels stressful and you’re talking over the top of each other, telling the kids to be quiet so you can talk, trying to go to the shops at these crazy crisis times to get the one thing you’ve forgotten.

You may need to just give that job to one of you. And if you share it, go, okay, well, you’re on Monday, you’re on Tuesday. So then you actually have a break from thinking about it one of the days. I reckon that’s really helpful because if both of you are thinking about all of it, both of you are going to be exhausted. So why not just break it up properly?

When we talk about mental load and the amount of it, what we really need to talk about burnout because mental load doesn’t just steal your time. I believe it just chips away at your soul, your emotional well-being, your stress, mum rage. I feel like it is coming from that mental load for me anyway.

One of the things to do to prevent burnout, I think, is to identify what’s non-negotiable. Figure out what truly matters to you and your family and just let the rest go. If one of your values, and again, this goes back to the ADHD values and planner, is having that healthy eating lunchbox and that is really important to you and that is non-negotiable, you need to prioritise that.

If getting homework done is not a priority, now, for some people it isn’t. For some mums, they do not feel like homework is appropriate. Their child resists it, it makes it really difficult and you’ve had that conversation with the school. I would not be prioritising it. If you just don’t really carry the weight and it’s not a high priority and your child doesn’t mind going to school without it done because some kids don’t care and homework is not a priority, I would not be adding that in on top of the lunchbox and on top of everything else, of everything else, of everything else.

It may be really, really difficult for you and your family because remember we’re neurodivergents. We might have children that have got executive function issues. We may have children that are developmentally delayed. So we may have a child who’s in grade five and a neurotypical expectation would be that they can brush their own teeth, pack their own bag, do their own lunch. I don’t really know what neurotypical children are like, but let’s just say that they are.

You may have a neurodivergent child that is not doing any of those things. So we could be doing a lot of those self-care, a lot of those helping scaffolding tasks for a lot longer. When we look at what we are doing, the library, all of the special days, all of the sporting stuff, the volunteering, whatever it all is, plus you’re helping your children with their self-care, scaffolding them, having them what they need for so much longer. It may be really hard to do it all.

So identify what is the non-negotiable. If you are unsure, have a look at my plan. Number two, create a toolkit for like anti-burnout. So for example, you might have micro self-care moments. If you don’t have a lot of time and a lot of people’s break is going to work, let’s just call it a spade a spade, a lot of people’s self-care is going to work. And that actually I think is probably a lot more regular than what we think.

Try and find five minutes, a few minutes, even if your kids are home that you can do in those times to just chill out. If you fill every single five minute break with productivity, you will feel exhausted a hundred percent. If you fill every 10 minute break with a new task, a new level of perfect, you will never get to the end. You will always feel exhausted and then you’ll probably feel guilty you didn’t spend enough time with your child. So schedule some breaks and have a look at where you can actually take a break.

The next point is to connect with others. There is nothing more validating than having someone share your experience. And that’s why I think this podcast has been successful because it really can fill a gap if you don’t have neurodivergent mum friends. But the neurodivergent mum friends are out there.

If you are unsure how to find neurodivergent mum friends, have a look at my pick up a guide for ADHD mums. It will show you how to pick out neurodivergent mums from the Playground Pickup. Shared experiences can be so validating and so empowering. If you struggle to do that or you can’t find any, you don’t know, you’re feeling really overwhelmed, just go online.

Go in the ADHD mums Facebook group. I moderate it myself. So I pride myself on not having those judgmental experiences in a Facebook group. We don’t need them. So go on there and try to connect with some local mums. There are chat groups for your local areas. Also go in there and talk about your experience. Put event posts up and have other people go, yeah, you’re right. It’s really hard.

The next one is to teach kids how to share the load. Now this can feel hard. And this has been really difficult for me because I’ve been playing this game for ages where I’m like, oh, my kids aren’t old enough. They wouldn’t be able to do that. But actually, getting a little bit more help in the school holidays has helped me take a step back and realise that I can give them more.

So we need to empower our kids to take on age-appropriate responsibilities. However, when I say age-appropriate, our kids might be developmentally delayed. A neurotypical responsibility may not suit them. And they may have different needs. So you might have one that’s younger that can unpack the dishwasher, one that’s older that can barely put her socks away.

So if that’s the case, you might have to break things up differently and have a look at how you do that and give them dopamine rewards for that. I’m not talking about a lot of money. I’m talking about paying them in 20 cent coins. But involving your kids feels harder because one, you have to deal with them and the whinging and the fighting and plan something which can feel really hard and break the task down, which can be really hard for you to show them how to do it.

But if we never upskill our kids, we will always be their slave. Always. If you do not teach your child how to get their own drink, pack their own lunch bag, fill up their own drink bottle, you will always do it. And I have nine, seven and five-year-old and I have only just figured out how to put the cups on the lower part of the cupboard, put the step in place so they can get their own drink. So I’m not coming from a place of, I don’t know how hard this is. I know how hard this is. This is tough.

Involving them in the planning, breaking down the tasks, showing them how to do it and lining it up so it’s easy for them can be difficult for an ADHD mum to do. I know it’s hard, but we will always be doing it if we don’t show them. Always. And at some point we will have to break down the task and show them how to do it. So why not do it now if you think it’s developmentally appropriate for them?

You might want to look at building those executive function skills in your children. So you might want to gamify chores. There’s a couple of really good apps that have got like tick, tick, tick, and they get little rewards if your kids are on iPads or a little bit older. Visual schedules can also be good. Just make sure that you don’t do it too overwhelming. I’m someone who will like go from zero to a hundred and then it’s overwhelming and no one uses it. So you need to make it really small.

And then you’ve got to remind yourself, of course, to teach them to check it, which is the step I kept missing. Have a look at how you can build skills around unpacking your own bag, undoing your own lunchbox. Now this can feel really hard initially, but once you get them into the routine, you will not have to do this anymore. Short-term it’s hard, but you do get that long-term reward.

You also might want to talk really openly about the mental load and how everyone can contribute. For example, if you have older children, say to them, hey, I actually really struggle to remember all of the library days and all the things. I’m going to have to give some of this to you. You need to write this down in your diary, show them how to do it. You may need to support them with medication if it’s hard for them. If you medicate, you may not and that’s okay.

But show them how you actually do it. How do you remember everything? How do things work? The other thing that I talk a lot about as well is if I have to remind you and you say you’re going to do it and then you wander off and don’t even try, that I have to re-remind you, that is really hard on my brain. If I say to you, are you going to get your drink bottle and you say yes, but you don’t do it, then I have to re-remember because you haven’t done what I’ve asked. It makes it really hard on my brain. I can’t do that for everybody all the time.

Now, I know that can be really hard because your child might be inattentive and they’ve just wandered off and seen something else and then done something else. That happens, but be open around how your brain works, how hard it is, and why it might be hard for them as well. Being open and transparent is only a positive thing because it opens up that ADHD discussion in a family. That’s my personal opinion.

Surviving the mental load of the school year isn’t about a magical solution. I wish there was. I wish there was a system or an app that I could just tell you to download and you would just be like, easy, it would be killing it. I know that sometimes we’re sold that dream and we buy that app, that thing, and it doesn’t work. But this is more around an attitude shift and the mental load is going to be invisible to others, but the work that you are doing behind the scenes is massive.

You may only see the failures when your child comes home and they don’t have the right t-shirt, but you are the glue that keeps everything together. Even when it’s falling apart, it would be a lot worse if you weren’t there. You are so important and all of the things that you do remember matter. And I know we don’t have clients, which are our children, that say thank you necessarily very often or are particularly grateful and they like to point out what we’ve done wrong.

We don’t get that gratitude in that way, but maybe we need to do that for our partner. If you see your partner or your family member or anyone who’s helping you, a friend, do something really great for your kid. So for example, maybe they put an extra costume in or a t-shirt knowing that you might forget. Say thank you. Help someone else out as well. If you know that, for example, there’s probably people that have ADHD that aren’t going to remember the wet bag for school and you’ve got two for the swimming day, put two in and say to your child, if someone else forgets them, let them borrow your bag.

Be that model and really acknowledge other people because when you start to do that, you will get the acknowledgement back as well. Let’s move forward, not with the expectation of perfection, but with the tools and strategies to navigate the chaos in a way that honours your limits and celebrates your wins.

Thanks for tuning in. If this resonated for you, share it with a fellow mum who could need support. And remember, the mental load doesn’t define you. It’s just one part of the incredible, messy, beautiful life that you live. See you next time. Thank you so much for listening.