If there’s one thing I’ve learned from raising an ADHD child while having ADHD myself, it’s that we need routines.
And yet, we also hate routines.
Too little structure and our family life quickly descends into chaos. Too much structure and everyone falls apart.
When my kids were little, I learned pretty quickly that they needed to know what was happening next. Whenever things got switched around or became unpredictable, everything tended to end in tears – for them and often for me too.
But rigid schedules didn’t work either.
Because some days your child comes home completely overwhelmed. Some days homework takes five minutes and some days it takes an hour. Sometimes there’s a club, a playdate or a last-minute school thing you’ve completely forgotten about.
And sometimes you’re the one who’s had enough.
So instead of trying to stick to a perfect routine, I started focusing on creating a predictable rhythm.
Finding your ADHD family rhythm
For me, the trick is having a few predictable anchors – things that happen in roughly the same order each day, without necessarily happening at exactly the same time.
Our average weekday evening looks something like this:
Home → snack → homework → gaming → dinner → activity/TV → upstairs → shower & teeth → PJs → reading → lights out.
The timings can move. Bits can get shortened, stretched or occasionally skipped altogether.
But the basic rhythm stays the same.
And that means nobody has to keep working out what happens next.
A routine you can actually come back to
I think this is the bit that makes the biggest difference in an ADHD household.
A rigid routine works brilliantly right up until something goes wrong.
A rhythm can bend.
If my child comes home overwhelmed, we can spend longer decompressing before homework.
If we’re late back from a club, we might shift bedtime so there’s enough space for them to wind down.
If everything goes completely off-piste, we haven’t failed at the routine – we just pick it back up at the next anchor.
For our ADHD family, that’s been far more useful than trying to make every evening run perfectly.
Same general rhythm. Plenty of room for curveballs. And always somewhere to pick it back up again.
If after-school and bedtime are the points when your ADHD household tends to descend into chaos, I go into much more detail in ADHD Mum, ADHD Kid about creating routines that actually work for ADHD families – including decompressing after school, managing homework and screen time, and creating a bedtime rhythm that helps everyone wind down.
