I don’t fully understand all the “why” behind ADHD—but I do understand what it feels like when everything turns into a battle.
Getting dressed becomes a standoff.
Brushing teeth turns into a negotiation.
Simple, everyday tasks somehow spiral into something much bigger.
If you’re parenting a child with ADHD, you might recognize this feeling—the sense that it’s not just one hard moment, it’s everything.
Why Can Simple Tasks Feel So Hard?
What looked simple to me wasn’t necessarily simple to my daughter.
“Go get dressed” sounds like one request. But there can be a lot hiding inside those three words—stopping what she’s doing, shifting her attention, figuring out what she needs to do next and staying with the task until it’s finished.
In our house, I have learned that my daughter’s ADHD can make some everyday tasks and transitions harder than they appear on the surface.
Starting a task can be hard for her. She can know exactly what needs to happen and still have trouble getting herself started.
Transitions can be hard for her. Stopping something interesting to do something routine can create friction before she’s even begun the new task.
Boring tasks can be surprisingly demanding. Getting dressed, brushing teeth and packing a backpack don’t offer much excitement, but they still require her to pay attention and follow through.
Big emotions can take over quickly. Once her frustration starts building, sometimes the original request almost disappears underneath the reaction.
My repeated reminders can add pressure. What starts as “Please put your shoes on” can become another reminder, another explanation and another response until both of us are caught in a back-and-forth that has very little to do with the shoes anymore.
That doesn’t mean every battle in our house is caused by ADHD. Sometimes my child simply doesn’t want to do something. Sometimes I’m tired and impatient. Sometimes we’ve both handled a situation badly.
But understanding some of the reasons an ordinary task might be harder for her has helped me stop looking at every difficult moment as simple defiance.
I Started Looking at the Steps Behind the Task
A conversation with her teachers helped me understand this differently.
I had been wondering about writing. Was writing genuinely difficult for her, or was she simply being defiant because she didn’t want to do that much of it?
With ADHD and dyslexia both in the picture, I can’t always neatly separate which struggle comes from where.
Basically, I was trying to figure out: Is she struggling to do this, or does she just not want to?
Her teachers helped me see how many steps were hiding inside one writing assignment.
She could read a passage and answer questions about it verbally. She understood what she had read and could recall details.
But writing an answer required much more.
She had to read and understand the passage, read the question, recall the information, decide what she wanted to say, organize her response, write it down, and think about spelling and grammar along the way.
What looked like one assignment was actually a whole series of tasks her brain had to organize.
And that made me start looking differently at some of the battles we were having at home.
If I ask my daughter to go upstairs and get dressed, that seems simple enough. And some days, she can do exactly that.
Other days, she seems to get lost somewhere in the process.
I’ve found that it can help to break the task into pieces. Instead of “Go get dressed,” I might first ask her to pick out an outfit. Then we move on to getting dressed.
Bedtime can work the same way.
“Go get ready for bed” means brush your teeth, wash your face, find pajamas, change clothes and get into bed. That’s obvious to me because I’ve done the routine thousands of times.
But I’ve learned that giving her one piece at a time can make the whole process go more smoothly.
Instead of saying:
“Go get ready for bed.”
Or listing everything at once:
“Go brush your teeth, wash your face, and pick out your pajamas.”
I give her just the first step:
“Go brush your teeth.”
I give her just the first step:
“Go brush your teeth.”
When that’s done:
“Now wash your face.”
And then:
“Go pick out your pajamas.”
The tasks themselves haven’t changed. The difference is that I’m not asking her to hold the entire routine in her head at once.
It doesn’t necessarily make bedtime dramatically faster. It just seems to make it easier for her to move through the routine without getting overwhelmed by everything that still needs to be done.
Once She’s Escalated, I Stop Trying to Finish the Task
I’ve also learned that once things have escalated, continuing to talk usually doesn’t help us.
This took me a while to understand.
I used to think that if I stayed calm—calm voice, calm body language—I was doing the right thing.
But even when I’m calm, if I keep talking, explaining or trying to guide her through it, I’m still engaging.
And sometimes simply responding is enough to keep the argument going.
When I step away and stop the back-and-forth, it gives her space to calm down without another response from me restarting the interaction.
It doesn’t work every time. Nothing does.
I’ve learned that once we’ve reached that point, getting the original task done isn’t really the problem we’re trying to solve anymore.
I’m Still Learning This Too
I’m still learning this.
I still catch myself thinking, Why is this becoming such a big deal?
But I’m getting better at looking past the battle and asking a different question:
What part of this is actually hard for her right now?
Sometimes the answer is that the task needs to be broken into smaller pieces.
Sometimes we’ve already gone too far and what she needs is space.
And sometimes I get it completely wrong.
But understanding that the battle isn’t always about the thing we’re battling over has changed the way I respond.
I share what we’re learning as we go—the things that work, the things that don’t, and the things I wish I’d understood sooner.
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