Show Notes:
Parenting with ADHD isn’t about trying harder—it’s about doing things differently. In this episode, therapist and school psychologist Holly Moore shares three powerful strategies to help ADHD adults not just survive, but truly thrive as caregivers.
You’ll learn how to ditch rigid systems that don’t serve your family, tap into your emotional reactions to re-parent yourself, and harness creativity as a tool for confidence, connection, and calm. Holly’s honest stories and actionable insights will leave you feeling empowered to build a home that works with your brain, not against it.
Whether you’re deep in the parenting trenches or just starting to make sense of your own ADHD, this episode is packed with relief, recognition, and real-life tools you can use today.
Top Three Things You Will Learn In This Episode:
1. Redesign Systems That Actually Work for You
You will learn how to evaluate and modify the parenting systems in your homes by tuning into your own instincts and emotional cues—especially when systems (like behavior charts or reward jars) feel forced, exhausting, or disconnected. Holly emphasizes focusing on micro systems—what’s within your control—and releasing the pressure to conform to external expectations.
2. Use Self-Awareness to Re-Parent Yourself
Holly dives into how your reactions as a parent can be deeply tied to your own childhood experiences. Through self-reflection and curiosity, you’ll learn how to identify triggers, recognize when a reaction is more about you than your child, and develop a more compassionate, present-centered approach to caregiving.
3. Embrace Creativity as a Tool for Regulation and Confidence
Rather than viewing creativity as a hobby or luxury, this episode highlights its critical role in emotional regulation, confidence-building, and accessing dopamine in the ADHD brain. You’ll gain ideas for integrating creative activities—like dance, music, improv, or gardening—into daily life as a form of healing and thriving.
Episode Notes and Resources:
Holly Moore’s website: https://www.thatsthemominme.com/
Support Mama Needs a Moment! Become a patron through our Mama Needs a Moment Patreon.
HER Circle – https://www.herhealthcollective.com/membership
Transcript:
Cindi
It’s such a pleasure to welcome Holly Moore to the podcast today. Mama Needs a Moment. Holly Moore is both a trained therapist and school psychologist. She works with individuals and couples who are seeking to move through challenging feelings, thoughts and behaviors so that they can establish relationships and habits that feel grounded. Holly has a special interest in neurodiversity, parenting, repairing from burnout, easing anxiety for all neurotypes and ADHD, she lives in a neurodivergent home. Thus, she’s very practical in her strategies and provides therapy from a place of understanding and relatability. How are you, Holly?
Holly Moore
I’m good. Thank you for having me. It’s really exciting.
Cindi
I’m so glad you’re here.
Crissy
We are going to dive right in today. We’re really talking about parenting with ADHD, three strategies for thriving as an adult and caregiver. And Holly, I want to kind of start us off looking at this idea of letting go of systems that don’t serve you, and I think that’s hard for a lot of people, because in a way, it can feel like we’re admitting defeat. That’s something we’ve kind of committed to, the system of how we get through something that isn’t working anymore, and that can be really hard. So I’d love to know, how can people recognize when a system is truly unhelpful versus something that just needs a bit of tweaking?
Holly Moore
I think, first off, when we think about the word system, it’s so many different meanings. And so we’ll talk a little bit about, like, how to maybe tweak the micro system, but knowing that, like that macro system, the systems that exist outside of us are the ones that we are tuning into. First off, the word system, it has a lot of different meanings, and I think that one of the things to imagine like, what’s within my control? What can I actually tweak? We’ll look at the micro system, and the micro system is like what’s happening in my home, but I definitely don’t want to ignore the fact that that macro system has so much influence on us. If you are looking at social media, or if you are in mom groups that like that mezzo system, like around your neighborhood, you’re gonna be influenced by ideas and information. But what we really can kind of go back to that which is within our control, is in our home and that micro system. How do we change those patterns that aren’t useful in there’s a couple of different kinds of ways we can assess that. One is turning inward and kind of deciding, like, how do I know when something doesn’t serve me or when it’s not useful any anymore. Am I finding that this icky feeling in my gut, or this like resentment that I’m having to commit to something, or this idea that Ugh, I’ve got to do this one more thing, and this thought keeps cycling and I keep not wanting to do it. So I think that there’s a couple ways you can key in to what doesn’t serve you, by leaning inwards. But I’ll give you kind of a concrete example for the micro system I have pulled up this I can do it chart. One of these is a behavior reward system. And I tried desperately for years to use a star chart, these behavior reward systems to get chores accomplished or responsibilities completed by my kids, and I always felt like I failed. I had an inability to put these in place that in a way that was useful for my kids. And I realized, screw it. I don’t need this behavior chart, I was trying to fit into this behavior chart versus figuring out what actually fits into my home. And so I always encourage parents in session to kind of assess if something’s not fitting into your home, begin to become curious, and then begin to imagine like, if I let it go and really looked at like what is useful in my home, and starting there first, I think that’s particularly helpful with ADHD, because with ADHD, parents with ADHD, or kids with ADHD, there’s a lot of different suggestions on what can be used, versus looking at like what already is useful.
Cindi
I agree with you. There is so much. So I also have neurodiverse children, and we have tried over and over to implement different processes that would just fail all the time. There was this one process that we had where it was they both had little jars with marbles in it, and that was their TV time. And if they did something that they needed a consequence. We would take a marble and we’d say, Okay, you lost five minutes from your TV time, and you’d hear it go into the jar and go kaplink. And so they would be like, no, no, I don’t want to lose part of my TV time. And it didn’t do anything. All it did was basically make me feel like I was this militant parent that, you know I felt so much shame, like that’s the thing you feel shame you do be so deeply ingrained. I feel a lot when it comes to parenting. What are some signs that the shame we feel about our child’s ADHD behavior is actually rooted in our own experiences, because I’m also neurodivergent?
Holly Moore
Well, let me ask you this, when you heard the kerplunk of the marball, how did you know that that system didn’t feel right to you?
Cindi
It was just this gut instinct and their response like, of course, your kids are going to push back. They’re going to push back because it’s something they don’t want. And it was a process that was given to us from a therapist. So I was like, Oh, this must be good. This must work. If a professional is saying that they need to understand that negative behavior requires a consequence. And so inside, there was just, was this nagging feeling constantly that this just isn’t it, this isn’t it. We kept trying and trying and trying. Nothing was changing.
Holly Moore
And so apart from like, their behavior and what you heard, their reaction, like in you, it felt like this just isn’t right, like you look back to like younger Cindi, and you begin to think, how would she have felt having experienced that? And it’s like you can imagine what, what age were you? When you begin to think maybe there were some neuro divergence in your life, or ADHD or…
Cindi
Early, because I have OCD behavior. So when I was young, I would have the obsessions and the compulsions, and I’m of the age that’s older, and nobody knew what it was. So my parents were like, this is a little unique, but I don’t know what to do. It must just be a stage that she’s going through. It was early, I’d say elementary age for sure.
Holly Moore
Yeah, it’s so common, like this elementary age, this, like, younger part in us that still exists in these, like, moments with our kids, they come up. I see it a lot when children have, like, social engagement with other kids, and it doesn’t work out well, and the parent will feel and this has happened to myself as well, where in the moment you’re trying to, like, how can I make it better? And I think we’re trying to make it better, not just for our child, but for that part that feels rejected in us. And I think sometimes what happens is you can also tell by your reaction as a parent whether or not, like, maybe this is speaking to something more about you than them, like, if your reaction is to take it away or change the system or fix the problem, then it becomes less about like, what is my child’s experience in this moment? Am I really seeing them? And it’s more about what is so uncomfortable within me that I need to remove it to make it better for everyone, and that usually is trying to get away from that feeling of shame or guilt, because shame or guilt, it just propels us in this really uncomfortable direction, and we quickly want to be like, put a lid on it, put it aside. How do I fix it? And I think that that is a beautiful protective part that comes out in our adult selves that know that this does not feel good. How can I make it feel better? And so what I think is more useful is becoming again curious and being like, oh, I can feel this in me. This feeling is telling me something about myself and that we get to kind of, maybe re-parent, a little bit like you decided in that moment that kerplunk like it wasn’t worth that experience. You were feeling, your gut instinct was like, This doesn’t feel right. And you could empower that gut instinct to be like, Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t feel right. We’re not going to do it. I’m going to love my children or show up in a different way to teach this skill, and it’s not going to be punitive or consequence oriented where, what’s wrong with you? You know, you have a different kind of path that you might choose. How we know it’s about us is we allow our body to tell us, like, what is the story My body’s telling me right now, that this isn’t working, and then also looking at the reaction that we’re having that kind of will help us understand, like, oh, I reacted really big to that, maybe even out of proportion, or this reaction doesn’t fit what my child was experiencing. It has something more to do with me that I need to kind of look into.
Crissy
So very powerful. I think sometimes in parenting, oftentimes in parenting, our responses to things that do trigger us can be so big, and you can feel it so viscerally inside your body, and it can be overwhelming. It can be kind of like, where did that come from? Why am I responding? Why is this so triggering? And I think it is really helpful to take a step back and keep that in mind, that there is something here that this isn’t necessarily about my child. This. This about me and something that I need to look at and re parent, perhaps. I do really love that.
Holly Moore
I think too, like, sometimes we have to make it visual. Like, so if you imagine yourself sitting on a bench, or you imagine yourself in the kitchen, or you imagine yourself putting the marble in the jar, if you imagined your younger self beside you, what would she need? Like, what would be useful? And maybe you don’t get to do that in the moment, but you do it when you’re laying in bed at night, and how you handle the situation really bothers you, and you get curious. Like, if she was beside me, like, what does she need in this space without creating shame in either the part that was clearly upset or was trying to do its best work, or the part that was younger.
Crissy
The younger me needs lots of hugs. So I want to switch gears a little bit and shift us over to talking about creativity, because I know in a lot of cases, creativity can be seen more as a luxury rather than a necessity. How can embracing creativity help those with ADHD function better in adulting and parenting and just showing up in day to day life.
Holly Moore
I think this is so important and so often overlooked because it’s just not prioritized, like getting the PTA form signed and all the other things become the priority, like getting to soccer or preparing food, meals like this, all becomes a priority, whereas creativity feels like an extra. And I think the research right now is it’s mixed, but and it’s growing in terms of the usefulness of creativity and ADHD, and it’s really, really cool, and I will get into the weeds about this, but there are studies being done where they’re looking at kind of genetic and like brain function, similarities between creativity and individuals with ADHD, and to seeing kind of the overlap, and there’s just not enough information to See, like, exactly how it overlaps, or what this means. But what they’re finding is creativity offers adults with ADHD something that is an outlet that can create a sense of accomplishment and purposefulness. And I think that sometimes, when you exist in this space of neurodivergency, and neurodivergency like whether it’s ADHD, whether it’s autism, whether it’s OCD, whether it’s like high levels of anxiety, depression, bipolar, these are all different forms of neurodivergency, right? But with ADHD in particular, one of the things that we know is that there is this ability to have divergent thinking, and I’ll explain divergent thinking as like the ability to think outside the box. And for individuals with ADHD, given that freedom to think outside the box and engage in activities that allow them that flow, it really accesses this dopamine pathway where they’re like, Oh, that feels good. I accomplished something that I did well at, and it spoke to one of my strengths, which is letting my brain just go in these creative directions without having to be confined to these tasks. And so having that purposefulness or accomplishment is also useful in building that self confidence and combating shame and guilt cycles. So if you want to remove shame, it’s not, and I remove shame that it’s an oversimplification. It’s not about just becoming curious and getting to know your younger parts. That is useful, for sure, because we’re trying to re change how we view ourselves and like to engage in that reparenting, but it’s also about engaging in activities that reinforce our unique qualities as ADHD individuals that can feel like a contribution, not only to like our micro systems, but our macro systems. I just think of all the creative problem solving and solutions that are have that that need to happen right now to allow parents to just parent the way they want to. It might not be that we are confined to a behavior chart, but we as neurodivergent individuals or neurotypical individuals begin to kind of think like, How can I incorporate creativity into my parenting style in a way that feels like it taps into some of my own strengths.
Cindi
Is there any particular piece of creativity, any type of creativity, whether that’s singing or drawing or or is it just anything?
Holly Moore
You need to know “the thing!”
Cindi
We’re bringing it home, Holly! We’re bringing it home!
Holly Moore
No, you’re like, let’s get that thing that’s going to be like, the biggest bang for our buck. Honestly, some of the research is really big on music, and music is very useful for ADHD ers, like learning music, engaging in music, engaging in dance, in extra. Size they call all can kind of get that dopamine pathway going that will allow that activity to build successful. But I think this is where, like, we kind of go back to knowing our younger selves a little bit if they could pick an activity for us to do, or if your adult part has always had this thought in the back of their mind of something that they wanted to do, that, just when they think of it, they can find lightness in their chest. They can feel kind of space in their shoulders. Then that’s the thing that you do. But the trick is, it’s a risk, because we are kind of conforming to the things that we should do. I’ve had a lot of clients, and even myself, like begin to engage in activities that push creativity. So I’m doing improv acting classes, joining a band, like just doing things that they never thought that they would do, or they thought was a dream. I did two years of water coloring, which I thought I’d always want to be a watercolor painter. I don’t know how you describe that, and it was so hard, and I was so terrible at it, and I had to, like, carve out this time. And it wasn’t always convenient, but the feeling afterwards, or like seeing myself, like, grow in the process, was like, Oh, wow. This is something about me that I didn’t know. And seeing it up and being able to share it was just, it was a really great experience. But even like these little needle stitching things, or being able to work with your hands and do kind of different exercises, gardening, with gardening you’re doing, like, a lot of activities that require access in the right left hemisphere. So these are all something that you get lost in your mind, and your mind gets to wander to different stories and ideas.
Cindi
Thank you so much.
Holly Moore
You’re so welcome. Thank you for having me. This was fun, as always.
