I’m a couples coach – ADHD isn’t an excuse to be a bad husband

“He has ADHD.” The couple look at me solemnly through the camera, as though they’ve just revealed the missing piece of a complicated puzzle. And I know exactly what’s coming next. I’m a couples coach. I help parents out of the cycle of arguments they all seem to be having: how much they’re each doing, how unappreciated they both feel, and why every attempt to fix it ends in a brutal row. About half of the couples I see mention either an ADHD diagnosis or suspected ADHD. And very often, it’s offered as one of the explanations for why their relationship has fallen so badly out of balance. Shorts But the imbalance they describe is identical to the one I see across all heterosexual couples after they have children. Research consistently finds that mothers carry a disproportionate share of the mental load: the anticipating, planning, organising and monitoring that keeps family life running. And every couple has a story that explains it. Sometimes it’s personal. Mum is more organised, more controlling. Dad is laid-back and lives in the moment. Sometimes it’s professional. Mum’s job is more flexible than dad’s. And sometimes it’s medical. Dad has ADHD, so he doesn’t have the focus required to see the planning and organisation of the home through. The sociologist Allison Daminger calls the first explanation “personal essentialism”. Couples who believe in equality don’t want to believe they’ve fallen into a gender pattern, so they tell themselves it’s about personality. But unless every mum and every dad happens to have the same personality type, that doesn’t really hold up. As for the profession argument, a study of couples where one partner was a doctor and the other a lawyer found that whichever profession the woman had, hers was the more “flexible” job. Flexibility wasn’t about the career. It was about which parent was expected to put the family first. So how much difference does ADHD actually make? I spoke to ADHD specialist Erica Djossa, author of Releasing the Mother Load, about parenting with ADHD. ADHD affects the brain’s ability to regulate attention, motivation and executive functioning. Someone with ADHD might be able to focus intensely on something stimulating, but struggle enormously with a task that’s important, repetitive and unrewarding. I feel that perfectly describes the mental-load tasks mums complain about being handed. They’re urgent, they’re important, and they are incredibly dull. The executive functions that ADHD affects are precisely the ones family life runs on. Remembering the dentist appointment, the PE kit, the form due on Friday. Planning ahead and managing time. Prioritising a hundred unfinished jobs. Then there’s emotional regulation, amid the sheer noise of family life. So ADHD does make parenting genuinely harder. And yet, when different parents have it, it comes up very differently. With the couples I coach, I often see this pattern: when dad has ADHD, I’m told it’s why he forgets things, drops balls and can’t take charge of the organisational side of family life. When mum has ADHD, it translates into: “I have ADHD, so these things are particularly overwhelming for me, and that’s one of the reasons I feel burnt out.” It isn’t offered as a reason she shouldn’t be responsible for them. Instead, she’s expected to find a way, often at considerable cost to herself. Djossa sees the same double standard with her clients. “If the roles were reversed in that exact same scenario, does mum get a pass for not following through because she has ADHD? No, she’s expected to figure it out.” Mums, with ADHD or without, feel forced to find a way. They’re often more attuned to the discomfort of the children, they pay the price directly when things go wrong, and they’re the ones judged by society at large. When I ask dads with ADHD how they manage it at work, some keep it a secret, worried about losing the contract or the promotion. Others rely on elaborate systems to remember meetings, hit deadlines and get things done. But they manage it, because the stakes are there for them. If they can build systems for the office, the question is why those systems stop at the front door? Hassan, 33, a father of two and founder of ADHD Dad Code, which supports dads with ADHD, has used the same excuse himself. “But if you can keep it together at work, ADHD isn’t the whole reason things fall apart at home,” he says. Work gives the ADHD brain urgency. Home doesn’t, “so it keeps sliding to ‘later.’ It’s not about caring more or trying harder. It’s about building the structure at home that work already gives you”. His own systems are simple. “My memory can’t be trusted, so nothing stays in it.” Everything goes into a shared calendar with alerts. And he brought one system straight from the office: a 10-minute check-in with his wife every Sunday to go over pickups, appointments, meals and who’s handling what. “It’s basically a team meeting, just at the kitchen table,” he says. “At work, I’d never just ‘remember’ a deadline, so I stopped expecting myself to do that at home.” Which brings up the question of compassion. Working around your ADHD all day at work, constantly compensating for the things your brain finds difficult, and potentially masking your neurodivergence, can be utterly exhausting. Surely home should be somewhere you don’t have to struggle in the same way? So where is the line between empathy and enabling behaviour that dads without ADHD have been getting away with for generations? Compassion doesn’t mean expecting someone with ADHD to stop having ADHD. There will still be forgotten appointments and unfinished jobs. What matters is what happens next. Do they take responsibility for finding a better system? Or does the diagnosis end the conversation? Maybe the answer is doing the boring jobs together. Hassan and his wife do a 15-minute reset once the kids are in bed: “Music on, timer on, done.” The solution for some might also be medication, professional support or rethinking who takes charge of what. Not all jobs need to be split equally. We all get to play to our strengths. What it can’t mean is: “This is who I am, and I can’t deal with this. So I’m going to my room and leaving it all to you.” Djossa, who has ADHD herself, says she has compassion for her partner if they drop the ball “the first time or two or three or four or a handful of times that happens”. “If that continues to happen, then I start to lose compassion and empathy because now we are not putting anything different in place.” And that’s when the question becomes: what are you doing about it? What do you need? I’m now saying to men with ADHD the same thing I say to men whose relationships have fallen out of balance because they’ve slipped into traditional gender roles: “This isn’t your fault. But it is your problem, and it’s your responsibility to do something about it if you want a happy relationship.” And the thing is, we know it’s possible to manage these responsibilities, even with ADHD. Mums with ADHD are proof of that.