Episode 67 – Why Routines Always Seem to Fail for ADHD Families (and How to Fix Them)

Jane McFadden:

If you are a hyperactive ADHD mum, you don’t need any accountability. You already have a slave driver and it’s you. So what we need is to strip it back, make it more simple and remove the guilt and the perfectionism and get back to what’s important.

First up, my personal values clarification exercise. This will stop you doing the same thing over and over and wondering why you didn’t get a different result. It is quick, it is simple, it is ready to implement straight away.

The next part is the essential de-stress planner for hyperactive mums. You can pick these up, put these down, start anytime. It won’t guilt trip you if you forget that it exists for a week. Use it to brain dump the chaos, prioritize like a boss and stop pretending that you’ll just remember everything in your head.

One of the things I got sick of was reflecting at the end of the day and thinking of all the things that were really important to me that I didn’t do. These resources are 100% fluff free and made for the ADHD mum life. They’re cheaper than therapy and far more satisfying than yelling at your microwave for ruining your fourth attempt at reheating coffee.

This isn’t about perfection. You need something that works with your life, not against you. Grab your copy now at adhdmums.com.au and all of the links will be in the show notes.

Jane McFadden:

Hello and welcome to ADHD Mums. If you are wondering, oh Jane sounds a little croaky, what is going on? I have pre-recorded this episode back when I had this COVID influenza linger.

So, love ADHD mum life. The school holidays went for 7,000 years, which was actually about six and a half weeks in Queensland. I think it was seven weeks in New South Wales. And I had about two weeks between the school holidays ending and going to hospital for a fairly major surgery for five days.

So I had two weeks where I was going to like live all of my life, right? Because I’m going to be quite immobile after the surgery. I’m going to be about four weeks probably not going to be walking very well.

I had very, very high hopes for these two weeks. And at the end of the school holidays, I was nursing two of my kids who became quite sick with this really weird kind of flu bug. Went back to school and I made a joke, which I never should have, and said, I just need that third kid to go down and I’m done.

Now, as soon as I said that, he basically became sick immediately. But not only that, so did I. So I’ve had this influenza bug and I’ve had a child sick home with me for the last two weeks. And I’m in the final run towards the hospital and I’ve just got my voice back, but it’s a little husky.

I’m trying to record these episodes so we don’t have to have a major season break while I’m recovering. So this is a prerecorded episode from before then, when I’m a little husky. And don’t you love ADHD mum life?

Today, I thought I was going to be home alone. And actually one of my kids has lice. So now I have them home because we need to de-lice today. It’s always joyous, isn’t it? I couldn’t believe it when I saw the lice in her hair this morning.

Anyway, we are going to continue on because I love podcasting and I thought this will actually be a really great pick-me-up. And I feel for the first time that my voice is recording worthy, which it hasn’t been recording worthy for about a couple of weeks. So I’m keen to get going today.

Jane McFadden:

I wanted to do this episode today about routines because I put in a couple of really great episodes around the school mental load, how to prepare for the school year, which will be in these show notes. I’ve got so much great feedback about them.

I wanted to highlight some of the ways that routines seem to fail ADHD families. But not only that, how to then fix them. Because we kind of already know that routines are really hard. They’re hard to be consistent with, they’re hard to create, they’re hard to maintain.

We already know that, but what we don’t know is how to work with our brain to get a good routine happening. So if you’re someone who’s poured your heart and soul and a lot of your money into creating a beautiful color-coded plan, but then before breakfast, the whole thing’s gone to complete shit, totally, this is for you.

And it’s not your fault. It’s not your family’s fault. The product probably doesn’t suit your family or you’re possibly getting too perfectionistic in the routine. We’re going to explore today why traditional routines often fall apart for ADHD families, but more importantly, how to build a system that works.

Jane McFadden:

We’re going to take the strategies from theory and put it into real life practical examples. This isn’t just make a checklist advice. We all know that.

It’s about transforming routines into an actual tool that will empower your family instead of just you getting overwhelmed and feeling like it’s all too hard and giving up. So I wanted to let you know straight up, I’m not someone who’s been able to do routines very well. If I’m honest, it was only in about August this year that I actually started to get on top of this properly.

I have been in quite a reactive, chaotic family home for most of my life. I had a stable upbringing. It’s nothing against my parents, but I’ve always been somebody that had a messy room, clothes all over the floor, no idea where my school bag was. I’d lose my blazer. I would always be terrified of the lost property bin.

And my mum would always say to me, if I lost my jumper, well, you have to pay the $60 for the new jumper to try and deter me. And I just always seemed to have things dirty, messy, chaotic. And I really have never been able to master some pretty basic tidying, washing routines. It’s just not really who I am.

Even if I wash dishes, some people will say, is that really washed properly? I’m not somebody that does this naturally is what I want to say, because one of my pet hates is when you see an Instagram influencer and they have the perfect body and they talk about a beautiful cleanse they’ve done.

And this is how good you can look and it only takes 20 minutes a day. And I look at them and think, if I did that for 20 minutes a day, I’d probably look the same or put on weight. Sometimes people are genetically predisposed to look amazing. And yes, they do this plan, but they would have looked that way anyway. That’s my belief.

So I don’t want to come from a place of my special interest or my hyper focus is organization and look how good you can do it if you just put your mind to it. That is absolutely not true. I find this very difficult and it’s only been in August this year that I’ve really started to tackle it.

And from really getting deep into some of these solo episodes that I’ve been doing, I’ve actually managed to unpack a lot of the things that I’ve been doing wrong. Now, usually I avoid systems. I avoid routines. I avoid visual aids because one, they annoy me. Two, they never look like they come out.

Like I see them on Instagram. I see them somewhere. I stick them on my wall and I think what’s wrong with me? Why did I look so terrible? I’ve actually gone ahead and bought a whole heap of them at the start of last year. And I made a couple of massive errors with it, which made me just give up.

And I want to go through that later, what the errors were and what I’ve done differently this time. So we’ve all done it before. We design the perfect routine. We’d laminate the charts. We do the timers. We have the stickers.

We go on Canva or we go online and we look at the visual charts. We print them out. And that’s the exciting bit. If we even get to print them, some of us never even print them, but maybe you print them. Maybe you actually laminate them. Maybe you even put them on the wall.

But then next thing you know, two, three days later, it’s fallen apart. Or maybe you’ve forgotten the part where you actually talk to your child about it. You don’t even show them where it is. You just assume that people can read you and that they know what you want them to do.

Typical ADHD trait is sometimes we have so much going on in our brain. We think that we’ve actually had a conversation with someone and we haven’t. And then we’re confused why they’re not doing what we wanted. I’ve been guilty of that.

In the big chart that I put up, I didn’t actually ever talk to my kids about it. And I was like, what’s next on the routine? I have no buy-in. So there’s so many things we can do, which we’re going to go over very shortly.

When I had the big, beautiful visual aid, I often actually got more upset with myself because then I would forget something. And then I would go back to my visual aid and be like, why is this not working? And it actually made me feel worse for a while.

Eventually I got to a point where I thought, I don’t think this is me. I think there’s something wrong with this system. There is a gap here that I can’t bridge. And it took me a while to realize what that was.

What I believe that was for me, and it may be true for you, is that I felt like I was trying to put this neurotypical system into a very neurodivergent reality. And it sparked me to really shift the way I approached routines.

Instead of forcing this rigid visual aid, beautiful system, and to stay in that rigid focus. Now for anybody out there who has autistic children, they’re autistic themselves, often we are dealing with quite rigid behaviors, quite black and white thinking.

What I actually talked to my husband about, because he used to own gyms, he’s very much into the physical body and physical health, which is funny because I’m obviously into mental health. When I talked to him about rigid thinking and rigid brains, I talked to him more around loosening somebody up when we’re talking about autistic people or autistic children.

Like warm them up and start to really loosen their muscles to see some flexibility in there, because that makes your life a lot easier when you have flexible people in your family, as opposed to everybody is rigid and everybody just wants it happening their way.

If you then force rigidity, like a rigid visual system, onto other rigid people in your family, unless the stars and the moon align and your rigid visual aid suits them perfectly, it can be really difficult to get everybody on board. For me, with a house of five people, two adults, three children, what are the chances of my rigid visual aid system matching their rigid thinking? Probably unlikely. And yes, it is unlikely because it didn’t work.

So I started to step back and go, well, look, I’ve got to be more flexible here, because we are teaching flexibility. That’s what we’re focusing on as a family at the moment is flexibility and prioritizing energy management, having enough energy in your emotions, your social, your physical energy to manage school.

So why am I forcing a rigid visual aid onto my neurodivergent family? And it’s been a game changer to look at that slightly differently.

Jane McFadden:

Now, quick back step for a moment. So neurodivergent children and people can be quite rigid. For example, if you have a child that doesn’t deal with change well, you drive the same way to school.

But one morning you have to stop at the pharmacy, so you have to go a different street. Suddenly your child gets panicked, upset. This is the wrong way. We’re not going the right way. Or you leave at a different time. That’s not the way they saw it going.

What rigid thinking really is, is that when a child or an individual’s brain expects something to be predictable or the same, they may struggle with flexibility and adapting to change. And this can create a really emotional response. It can create a meltdown.

So if you have, for example, oh, somebody’s sick now, dad will have to take you to school. Mommy has to stay here. I’ve got to take this other child to the doctor. You may have a sibling that just can’t cope with that change. So that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about rigid thinking.

If you have children or people in your family that are rigid and you have a rigid visual aid, and that doesn’t suit the way they think it’s going to go, and they don’t buy in to that plan, you are going to struggle to implement it. If they really like to watch the TV and have their toast, and suddenly they’re having cereal or they’re all sitting at the dinner table, you may get kickback because that may not be something that they are willing or able to be flexible about.

So have a look at flexibility and rigid before you get started in this. So let’s get into why there is routine resistance.

It isn’t just that we’re disorganized or we can’t do it. It’s a neurological thing. We know that our ADHD brains are going to crave novelty. We know that routine tasks are not going to provide enough dopamine. Mundane tasks actually feel physically painful to start.

We know that we have hyper focus versus boredom. We know that ADHD thrives on extremes. They are either all in or they’re out completely. Routines kind of fit the out completely. A lot of ADHD people and children will avoid them.

Also, it can take a lot of effort to go between tasks for an ADHD brain. So if we are setting up multiple steps on a visual aid, it can be really hard for our kids and for us to transition quickly from one thing to the next.

So when we’re there with our kids going, next thing, next thing, what’s next? It can actually take them a little bit longer to even process this, think about it and be okay with it. And if we’re just expecting them to go from one to the other in a short period, like you’ve put five steps in a 10 minute period, it’s gonna be really difficult for them to do that.

So we need to be aware when we’re designing the routines that we’ve got to go around these neurological roadblocks. We have to create novelty, flexibility and then reward to actually get that dopamine working to get any type of buy-in at all. So one of the biggest steps here is to create a framework.

If you are an autistic parent, you may really like to have something to be quite rigid. Autistic people love rules. So you might go, oh, this is now the rule and you’re happy with that. Flexibility can feel overwhelming for autistic people and children.

However, often with autistic people, they also are ADHD. So you’ve got this push and pull between I’m bored, I want to do things differently, I love chaos, I want to be able to do what I want. And then on the other side, you’ve got this autistic structure and rigid that they like.

So it’s really tricky when you have a hotbed of neurodivergent brains in your family as to how to get this working really well. The key is flexibility though, because one day that was great may not be replicated the next, which is a killer when you think you’ve got it nailed and then it falls apart the next day.

So instead of thinking about a rigid routine, we’ve really got to think about an adaptable framework that is going to shift around your energy, your focus and external demands. No two days are the same and no one has the same level of functioning every day that is neurodivergent, I don’t believe.

So your child can do things one day, you can get up one day and do this, the next day you can’t do anything. And that can be really difficult because if your child or you, it worked one day, why can’t it work the next? It doesn’t work like that though.

It’s like some days I feel like I’m killing it as a mother. I’m so patient. I’ve done this, I’ve done that and the next day it’s just a complete mess and nothing has really changed.

One thing that I think is really important is to create core anchors. So identify a couple of must do’s, for example, eat breakfast or get dressed. They may be the two or three main things that you are going to do or your kids are going to do every day, regardless of chaos or anything else.

There may be some tasks that are kind of floating, that you might assign some time slots, but just allow flexibility to see whether they’re going to be completed or how they’re going to be completed.

So for example, if your partner is on clean up duty after breakfast, you might not say immediately move all the plates, put them in the dishwasher. You might say at some point before work or at some point before this time, make sure that all the plates are taken to the dishwasher, but there’s going to have to be flexibility.

Because on the other end, if you say to your partner, you must move them immediately. And then one of your kids melts down and he or she goes, well, I have to clean the plates immediately. Then you’re going to be confused why your partner’s not helping you when there’s an emergency.

It’s like, because you’ve made this rule up that it has to happen this way. So with an ADHD family, particularly with multiple children, there really needs to be flexibility in there to be able to work well as a team.

We also need to make sure that we’ve got multiple ways of creating a system. So instead of just having a phone alarm or just a note on the fridge, you might need to have both. You might need to have an alarm going on your clock, alarm going on the fridge.

You might need to also have a sticky note or some kind of visual aid around what it is that you’re supposed to be doing. You might need to have multiple steps because if you have people in your family that are only going to be reading visually, but then you’ve got other people that are only auditory, you need to be aware of different ways that people process information.

You want to have multiple ways for people in your family to check about the routine. And when I talk about the routine, we’re talking about the must-do’s only. We’re not adding in 17,000 things.

So most ADHD coaches and a lot of the things on Google, if you Google ADHD, they’ll straight away go visual schedule. Yes, we all know that. However, often visual schedules don’t work for neurodivergent families.

One thing that I think does work well, by the way, power to you if a visual aid and visual schedule does work, and it can work, but I’m going to go into the ones that are more likely to work and the ones that are less likely to work. The first one that’s more likely to work is a gamified visual system.

You can actually create tokens, create rewards, and then work towards completion. You can have family leaderboards, you can have simple rewards, you can have, you know, the first to finish morning tasks, something like that. Quick warning with that, I would not have competitions within siblings.

I wouldn’t have my children, three of them, A, B, and C against each other. I find that that creates more arguing. There’s usually one child that does it so much better than the others. And then they all get jealous and it’s this big thing.

But what I do do is I have competitions between siblings and parents. My children are on one team and my husband and I are on one team. There is nothing that unites a team more than a common enemy.

So I like to put the kids against my husband and I because it makes them work as a team to get us. There is nothing more exciting to my boys particularly than getting dad. They just love it. And my husband actually takes quite a long time to get ready. So they just think it’s the best to beat him and they help each other.

Now you’re creating teamwork amongst siblings, not competition amongst them. I find that just creates more sibling fighting, which makes me lose my mind.

Jane McFadden:

You could do apps. There’s so many apps, but I wouldn’t go and download an app thinking it’s going to be the answer. It probably isn’t going to be the answer. A lot of people just use Gcalc, notes, I’ve got a values and planner workbook on my website on adhdmums.com.au. You could use magnetic boards, tiles.

It’s actually about keeping it simple and the way you implement it, not exactly what app it is. I wish there was an app that would just be easy and would work for everybody. Unfortunately, I don’t think that exists.

One big mistake that I think ADHD families do when they’re putting routines into place is not addressing the sensory needs in the routines. We really need to look at sensory stuff. So for example, we need to have a look at what is going to set one child off.

For example, if you have a child that has some really strong sensory issues with noise and you have another child that likes to just blend smoothies, or you have a partner that loves to make protein shakes in the morning, and you are putting that blender on repeatedly next to your child that is eating breakfast, that is noise sensitive, that is going to ramp them up.

When we look at a cup and people always talk about, you know, fill your cup, et cetera, et cetera. If we look at like in terms of that you filled a cup up too much and it’s going to overflow, I like to talk about this in terms of mum rage.

So for example, if you have a cup and you wake up in the morning, you’re being woken up overnight, you’re exhausted, the kids have woken you up early, you haven’t had enough sleep, your cup might already be quarter full before you start. And so every time you are put in environments that don’t suit your sensory profile, for example, mum, mum, mum, or scratchy clothing, things that you don’t want to do, you know, the blender’s running, the dog’s barking, you’ve got multiple demands, your phone’s pinging, what are we taking to school today? Mum, mum, mum, mum.

Your cup is going to be filling up quite quickly and then someone might just tip that cup over, it’s not even nine o’clock, have you got to work yet? This happens the same with our kids. If we are putting them in environments that don’t suit their sensory needs, their cup is filling up.

So by the time we say to them, hey, buddy, can you jump in the car? They like fly off the handle and you don’t know why. We want to be making sure that we keep our family’s cups as low as possible in the morning by not filling them up with things that don’t need to be there.

So for example, I find it really hard to get out of bed. I need to have medication next to my bed with a glass of water and do not speak to me until I’ve had that and it’s gotten into my system for at least 10 to 15 minutes. I wouldn’t then put my medication on the other side of the house and attempt to feed animals, talk to kids, mitigate some fighting, and then try and remember to then take my medication.

So think about things that set up your day well and have those there available to reduce the morning overwhelm.

If you know that transitions are hard in your family, you have a child that doesn’t transition well, when I talk about transitions, what I mean is they’re basically just shifts from one activity place or state to another. So neurodivergent children can struggle with transitions.

For example, if they’re in the middle of playing a game and then you’re like, get up buddy, we’re going to get in the car, they may need more time for that. Some kids really struggle with transitions. They get upset. It can trigger meltdowns. They can become really overloaded. They can be difficult then to drop off.

If you have a child that doesn’t transition well, then we need to build that into the visual schedule or into the routine in the morning. If dinner is hard or breakfast is hard, expect that. So if you are just taking a routine off the internet and expecting everybody to be able to do it, that may be part of the problem.

And that was part of the problem for me. I was like, this is a typical routine. Why can nobody do it? So figure out what makes the morning go well, figure out what makes the morning go not so well, and think about the indicators around that.

So look at the environment and think about it as if you’re a detective. If you think, oh my goodness, when my daughter sleeps in, it is like complete chaos. You may need to look at what time she goes to bed. You might need to look at an alarm system. What is it that you can do that gets her up on time?

That’s the part you change. You don’t just go, everyone has to get up at 6am and then your daughter’s going to bed really late. She wakes up grumpy. She can’t sleep in. And then you’re like, why aren’t you getting up? Well, maybe it’s the routine the night before that’s the issue.

So get really clever and detective about your environment. If you try to put a routine into an environment that’s not really working, or it’s not going to work for your family, it’s never going to happen. It doesn’t matter what you do.

So you want to make it easy and sustainable, and you want to make it easy for your kids and for your family to actually do. You might need to look at a 9am meeting and just know it’s not going to work. You might want to strip back the deal breakers.

For example, I wouldn’t do visual aids on a healthy breakfast, cooking eggs, having washing done, picking up plates. I can’t do any of those things. What I’ve stripped back my morning schedule to, and I just thought I’d give you an example.

Everyone gets up at 6am. One child and I have decks because we actually cannot move. We cannot function. And we are both really awful to be around if we have not had any decks. I cannot figure out what I need to put in each bag, and I’m grumpy. And so is my other child who’s similar.

What we have done is my husband and I have delegated into who does what. He does breakfast always. Don’t talk to me about it. Don’t ask me. Don’t whinge to me about who’s eating what. Hubby, you’re on breakfast. I do lunches and I pack bags and figure out who’s got to go where. Those are the two structures that we have.

And then we have one thing that our children are working on. We have an app on a screen, and they get a star for each time they brush their teeth in the morning and at night. Brushing teeth we find problematic. I think it’s too boring.

That is what I want to hear from them. So they each get a star every time they brush their teeth. Now at the end with the stars, if they get enough stars, they get like a new backpack, I think it is. And you can create how many stars gets what prize, basically.

So I would love to put washing, clean up, tidy clothes away, blankets, toys back in room, kids take the plates to the sink, pack their own bags. I’d love to do that. And that was the mistake I made where I put all of those things into the visual aid. None of it was achievable. At the moment, we can only do one thing. That’s just teeth.

So the visual aids that I’ve made on Canva, all they are is very simple. It’s bare minimum. It is like get up, get dressed, shoes on, breakfast, teeth. That’s it. And my husband and I have to focus basically on just getting the kids to do that and just getting them to do the teeth.

Now, as we progress and as we develop and as we start to build that habit, we will add a second thing in there like taking plates to sink or, you know, giving them a job. But at the moment, we’re just not there yet. So am I going to create the visual aid, force everybody to do it or try to force them, fail every day and wonder why? No.

We’re just going to do the teeth for the moment because that is a really important hygiene issue that we need to get sorted. So I’d ask you to have a bit of a look at what are your deal breakers? What are the things that you actually have to do? Make it as bare minimum as possible if you’re just starting out.

Jane McFadden:

If you have a partner, then give them a particular job. You know, this is your job. And then when you wake up, you know, like both doing breakfast, both doing lunches, you’ve got clear guidelines on who’s doing what.

I try to make them permanent jobs because otherwise it’s confusing. You’re doing that today. I’m doing this that day. Work to people’s strengths. My husband hates doing lunches. He’s awful at it. He finds it too frustrating. So I’ve given him breakfast because he finds that easier.

Break things up as well as what you can and don’t put pressure on yourself to have a house perfect before you leave. My house looks like a bomb’s hit it every single time I leave. And I’ve just kind of gotten to a point of that’s okay because at the moment we’re focusing on teeth and getting there on time.

If I was to go and add those things in, we wouldn’t get there on time and we probably wouldn’t do teeth or anything else. So strip back your must-haves and make sure that your team understands what they are. We don’t want to skip the part where we don’t talk to our family about the routine.

Have that family meeting. I’m going to put the episode into the show notes on what the family meeting is. And I’m also going to be releasing soon some templates on how to structure a family meeting and what to say in them. But basically in this episode, which escapes me the name of it, but I’m going to put it into the show notes, it talks about the family meeting and what to say in it.

Now in that weekly family meeting that you have, you would want to talk about the routine. You want to problem solve with everybody. What has been some of the issues that we have? I think it might be the planning for the school year episode. In that episode, we talk about what’s gone well, what hasn’t gone well, and then having like a game plan with your family.

So when you’re coming up with this, I wouldn’t just go, I’m coming up with this. It’s on the wall, go. Your family may need buy-in here. So have an open discussion, talk to your kids, talk to your partner if you have one about what has worked well, what would work well for them, and what can we get as a bare minimum, and then we can move forward and improve from there.

So we don’t want the routine to feel like a straitjacket on our family, and we are just firing off orders at people. This is about having a team and engaging them, and everybody working together as a positive goal.

Think about your family as a team, and you’re playing a game every morning, and your game is to win. The game might be to brush teeth and get there on time, and then you’re like, go team, we’ve won today. I know that can seem a little bit silly, but that’s the way I like to think of my families.

I have to engage my team to get them to perform, to win the game. That for me feels fun enough to make it have enough dopamine for me to be interested. Otherwise, I don’t care what time I get there, but that’s setting a poor example for everybody else.

So I try to gamify it for myself, like go team, team McFadden, we’re going to get there on time. Let’s go, well done, high five everybody. And that really engages everybody, and I feel like I’m the coach of the team.

And for me, that works well, because for me, motherhood is leadership. I’m engaging my team members, my partner, my kids. We’re playing to everybody’s strengths, we’re making everybody feel good. What can we do to help the other person that’s struggling with this? And I look at it like a team and like sport.

If there’s boring things that you want everybody to do, like a family cleanup, I like to do a family cleanup on a Sunday, pump music and just be really silly and go, yeah, you know, we’re going to clean up. But remember as well, I’ve got kids under 10. So if you’ve got teenagers, I would assume they’ll just look at you like they just want you to just die.

So obviously you’ve got to tailor it for your family, but have a think about ways that you can make things more fun. If you aren’t sure about some of these, jump into the Facebook group and ask questions. The Facebook group is amazing. We’ve got so many great people with so many great ideas in there.

If you are wanting more information or got some questions or want to share something that’s really cool that you do, jump in there. We have an ADHD hack post that had over a hundred comments with really cool ideas for some things that women are doing around Australia at the moment that are really improving their lives in their routines and around the house. So jump into the Facebook group.

So really we need to look at having accommodations within the routine. If your routine is failing, it can be because it’s built around an external expectation that’s just not ADHD friendly. So we really need to have a look at how we can adapt towards our children and make it work for their strengths.

Jane McFadden:

One of the other big things that I think that people struggle with is becoming too rigid around how it has to go. Being rigid with routines is a quick way, I think, to start to lose energy, disengage your team members and have it start to just probably fail.

I really have a look at, well, where are we at with our routine? At the moment, we’ve been coming out of sickness. Now, I’m not going to hammer that the routine has to be the same. If I’m unwell, the kids are unwell, we’ve got kids off, we’ve got kids on, we’re not going to hammer that the routine has to be the same.

We know that people are fluctuating motivation and fluctuating capacity. So some days your children may be able to do that and other days they can’t. Some days I do the dishwasher in the morning, some days I do it like two days later. So we need to be flexible about the things that don’t matter.

This is why it’s important again to create those few deal breakers about what have to happen, like packing a lunch has to happen. Doesn’t matter if you’re high energy or low energy, you can’t send your child to school with no lunch unless you’re ordering canteen.

You might even need to put on your visual planner, like this is an additional, if you have time, that’s best case scenario, but not hold yourself or others to that standard if you are in a low energy week. You may find with your period that you may be like, I’m on PMDD or on PMS at this time, I’m not going to be able to do this, this and this at that time.

My partner, you may need to do this because I know that that’s going to be tricky for me. For example, you might go, at this part of my cycle, I would do the pickup and the drop off. At that part of my cycle, I don’t want to see people. So partner, that might be you then, or you catch the bus then or whatever it is.

Think about what in the routine is hard and then work back from that. If you have come to a place where you’re like, everything is broken down and I don’t know why, or you’re listening to this episode thinking, yeah, I’ve created routines and they haven’t worked in the past. Think about why.

Were you unrealistic in your expectations? Did you have a lack of flexibility? Did you not get buy-in? Were you missing the part where you went and checked it and reminded everybody? Did you have no reminders? Did you not have any timers? What was it that didn’t work?

You may find that a small tweak can get you back on track. So don’t throw the whole thing out. It might be close, but there was a few things you were missing. Or do a restart and just identify your non-negotiables.

You might have an emergency default routine in your back pocket and be like, this is the bare minimum. Like if you have gastro or hair loss or something random happens, this is my like worst case scenario routine. You might have different routines for different days, different parts of your cycle.

If you’ve got a FIFO partner, if you’re trying to push in the same routine every day, that can be part of the problem. And look at yourself with compassion. Okay, this isn’t about being shamed or feeling guilty that you didn’t get the routine working.

This is why I wanted to be upfront that it’s only been in August this year that I’ve really started to turn a corner on this. And I’ve really made some major mistakes with this in the past. But instead of thinking about them all the time and wondering what I did wrong, I can’t do it. We just got to problem solve what you can do, get positive about it and just keep trying.

If it feels hard, it probably is hard. If you are two or three routines in and you haven’t got one yet, that’s probably completely normal. I don’t know any ADHD family that have just got one routine, it’s worked instantly and they’re really good at it. Seems like this is a battle for most of us. So be kind to yourself.

Routines don’t have to be the source of stress or failure. With strategies like flexible frameworks, strength-based approach, they can become tools for stability and empowerment. Routines are about creating scaffolding for your brain. They’re not a straight jacket that you just have to force yourself into a neurotypical mould.

If you take just one thing away from today, let it be this. Routines are not about perfection. They are about finding what works for you and your family in this moment. That is enough. This is not about perfection. This is about what works for you today.

Thanks so much for listening. If today’s episode sparks some aha moments, please share it with a fellow ADHD mum. And remember, you are not alone in navigating these challenges and together we can create routines that feel less like a battle and more like a lifeline.

This episode is inspired by so many conversations in the ADHD Mums Facebook group. The link will be in the show notes. So many of you have shared ups and downs of creating routines and I hope these strategies empower you to approach them differently.

Let’s keep sharing what works and together we are going to build a community of support for you. Good luck with your routines. I hope this was helpful. Thank you so much for listening.