Neurodivergent parent overwhelm: From crisis to clarity

Neurodivergent parents raising neurodivergent children face a dual load that rarely gets named or supported. In this episode, Michael Coles, a 51-year-old autistic ADHDer and neurodiversity advocate, shares how capturing overwhelming moments transforms them from crises into patterns and plans. Learn how tools that reduce cognitive load, connect fragmented information, and affirm parental self-care can shift families from reactive overwhelm into proactive clarity. Michael's honest conversation reveals that supporting yourself is foundational to supporting your child.

You're at a theme park. It's school holidays. One moment everything is fine, and then it isn't. Your child is gone, there are people everywhere, a lifeguard to find, a direction to run in, and your brain, your wonderfully monotropic brain, can only do one thing at a time. So it starts to shut down.

If you recognised that moment, even a version of it, you already know what it costs to be a neurodivergent parent in a world that expects you to handle everything at once. The question isn't whether these moments will happen. They will. The question is: what do you do with them after?

In Episode 31 of the Neurodivergent Pulse podcast, host Laetitia Andrac speaks with Michael Coles, neurodiversity advocate, public speaker, and host of the Deep Dive Podcast, about what it looks like to parent neurodivergent children as a neurodivergent parent yourself. Michael brings 51 years of lived autistic and ADHD experience to the conversation, alongside his work as a Programme Facilitator at Empower Autism. He shares with honest openness what changes when you finally have a tool that helps you connect the dots, not just for your children, but for yourself too.

When your autistic traits clash with your child's

Parenting neurodivergent children as a neurodivergent adult is a dual load that rarely gets named, let alone supported. Understanding Zoe's latest findings show that neurodivergent parents of neurodivergent children average 37 hours a week on support and advocacy, with emotional and cognitive load highest in this group. Michael is clear from the outset that there is no tidy baseline to work from: "I must put a preface basically saying that week to week is still different for us because you can't predict what it's actually gonna look like."

His two children are each distinct in their sensitivities, their anxieties, and the way they interact with the world. What regulates one may not touch the other. What works on Monday may fall apart by Wednesday. For more on embracing the unpredictability of neurodivergent family life, Tracey Jewel's story offers a grounding companion perspective. Layered underneath all of that is Michael's own autistic and ADHD brain, which brings its own rhythms, its own limits, and its own moments of friction.

Sometimes our autistic traits clash, and I'm trying to sort of work out how I can do this properly.

That sentence holds something many neurodivergent parents quietly carry but rarely say out loud. When your child is dysregulated and your own nervous system is already stretched, the clash is not a failure of parenting. It is the reality of two neurodivergent people navigating the world together, in real time, without a script.

What a monotropic brain actually needs in a crisis

Overwhelm in the neurodivergent parent's life is not always a slow build. Sometimes it arrives all at once, and the body responds before the mind can catch up. Michael describes one such moment with the kind of honesty that makes you feel less alone.

"My daughter basically, like, absconded at a theme park," he shares, recalling the school holidays. "And I, with my sort of monotropic brain, I can only sort of do one thing at a time. I was trying to sort of, like, you know, just trying to get a lifeguard or trying to sort of, like, you know, then look for a child. And it was very... And there was a lot of things going on at the same time. And with me, I think sort of my brain was sort of, like, going in too many directions and it was causing me to shut down."

This is what overwhelm looks like for a monotropic brain: not a dramatic collapse, but a brain reaching the edge of what it can hold and beginning to fragment. For a deeper look at understanding what overwhelm signals in the neurodivergent nervous system, Kaya Lyons' work on polyvagal theory offers a powerful companion framework.

For neurodivergent parents, this kind of moment is not rare. Research across 1,091 Australian families found that 64% of parents raising neurodivergent children often feel exhausted and 64% feel overwhelmed, compared with 42% and 32% of parents raising neurotypical children. It is the predictable result of an unpredictable situation meeting a brain that processes the world differently. The shame often comes later, in the quiet after. But Michael's framing points somewhere more useful: what if this moment could become information?

How to turn a parenting shutdown into a plan

The shift from reactive to proactive neurodivergent parenting starts with capturing what happened, not just surviving it. Before Understanding Zoe, Michael's reports, observations, and clinical notes lived on a hard drive or in his head. There was no single place to bring them together, and no way to connect the dots between what professionals observed and what was actually happening at home.

Now, he describes "capturing those experiences that we actually have as parents" so that "if there's a similar situation again, I know to plan for it and I know to basically sort of, like, you know, I could sort of, like, we could have a plan." The theme park moment, rather than just being something to recover from, becomes something to learn from.

What can be captured in the app includes:

Assessment reports and clinical documents uploaded directly into one place
Emails from teachers, OTs, speech pathologists, and psychologists
Real-time observations about what triggered a difficult moment
Notes on what helped and what didn't in a specific situation
Patterns across routines, such as morning and evening, where things sometimes work and sometimes don't
Lived experiences that previously only existed in the parent's head

The AI then helps connect those pieces, surfacing patterns that are hard to see when you're in the middle of managing them. For a monotropic brain already stretched by daily demands, having that synthesis happen externally is not a luxury. It is a genuine reduction in cognitive load.

Supporting yourself is not separate from supporting your child

Self-support is not selfish for neurodivergent parents. It is foundational. Michael speaks to this directly when he describes using Understanding Zoe not just for his children, but for himself as an autistic ADHDer navigating his own challenges alongside theirs.

I'm not the perfect parent.

Those five words carry more weight than any polished parenting advice. Michael says them with quiet openness, and in doing so, offers something many parents desperately need: permission to be human. He describes how the app helps him "sometimes manage the frustration" and reminds him to "take a step back and sometimes realise that basically sort of what I'm doing may not be helping." That pause, that moment of self-awareness, is one of the most powerful parenting tools available.

There is also a broader recognition worth naming. As Michael puts it: "If your children are autistic, it's most likely that you're autistic and you're probably not diagnosed yet." This is borne out by the data. According to our research on neurodivergent families, over three in five parents raising neurodivergent children identify as neurodivergent themselves, either through formal assessment or self-identification.

Many neurodivergent parents come to their own neurodivergence through their children's diagnoses, often decades into adulthood. Having a tool that supports adult self-understanding, not just child management, opens a door that professional systems rarely offer. This is where neurodivergent parent burnout often begins: in the gap between the support available and the support actually needed.

How to stop being the only one who holds your child's history

Information fragmentation is one of the most exhausting features of raising neurodivergent children, and for a neurodivergent parent with executive function challenges, it carries an extra weight. Research shows that 93% of parents raising neurodivergent children say their experience feels misunderstood or invisible, a figure that reflects not just social isolation but the systemic reality of being the sole carrier of their child's story. Reports from the OT, notes from the speech pathologist, observations from the classroom teacher, and the parent's own lived experience rarely end up in the same place at the same time. Michael is direct about why this matters: "Communication between clinicians, the schools and also the families is actually really, really important."

He has invited his children's clinicians onto the app, with some embracing it readily and others slower to engage. Laetitia shares a similar experience: their speech pathologist and OT jumped in quickly, while the psychologist and paediatrician have been harder to bring on board. The adoption curve is real, but the direction of travel matters. When session notes, emails, and observations are all in one place, the parent stops being the sole carrier of institutional memory. Finding peer support for neurodivergent families can ease that load further, offering connection alongside practical tools.

Michael also points to another practical shift: rather than re-explaining your child's needs every time they enter a new setting, you can build a document that does it for you. He describes being able to "put a document together, basically with the strengths, weaknesses, the challenges and all that type of thing and the accommodations that you need to put in." That document travels with the child. The parent doesn't have to start from scratch every time.

What neurodivergent parenting actually needs in the hard moments

The most important thing a tool like this provides is not a feature. It is presence. Having something to reach for in the moments that matter most, when professionals are unavailable, when the school is closed, when everything has just gone sideways, changes the experience of being a neurodivergent parent in a way that is hard to overstate. Laetitia explores what in-the-moment support looks like for neurodivergent parents in a deeply personal solo episode.

Michael describes wanting "more of this sort of like the tools we could actually sort of use in sort of situations where it's very challenging," because "sometimes you can have moments where everything's going pretty well, but then sort of like one moment, it can sort of like bring everything down." The app doesn't prevent those moments. But it means you're not starting from zero when they arrive.

When Laetitia asks what he would say to someone on the fence, Michael's answer is unhesitating:

It will change how you actually interact with your children and interact with the world.

That is not a sales pitch. It is a statement from someone who has lived the before and the after. If you're ready to experience the difference yourself, you can try Understanding Zoe free for 7 days and see what shifts when you have a tool that works with your neurodivergent brain, not against it.

Being a neurodivergent parent is not something to fix

Michael's conversation with Laetitia is a reminder that the dual load of parenting neurodivergent children while navigating your own neurodivergence is not a problem to be solved. It is an experience to be supported. The unpredictability, the clashing traits, the moments of shutdown: these are not evidence of failure. They are the texture of a life that deserves better tools, better conversations, and more honest voices like Michael's.

One captured moment at a time, families can move from constant reactive overwhelm into something that feels more like clarity. And that shift, small as it might seem on any given Tuesday, is worth everything.

Frequently asked questions

What do neurodivergent parents actually struggle with?

Neurodivergent parents often carry a dual load: managing their own neurological differences while simultaneously supporting their children's. This means executive function challenges, sensory sensitivities, and emotional regulation needs don't pause when the parenting demands arrive. Add in information fragmentation across clinicians, schools, and reports, and the cognitive load becomes significant. The specific struggle that rarely gets named is that a parent's own dysregulation and their child's can collide in real time, with no script for navigating it. To understand why Understanding Zoe was built to address this gap, listen to the story behind Understanding Zoe's mission.

Can an autistic parent raise an autistic child well?

Absolutely. An autistic parent raising an autistic child brings genuine strengths: lived understanding of sensory overwhelm, authentic empathy for meltdowns, and an insider perspective on what support feels like. The challenges are real too, particularly when autistic traits clash between parent and child. But as Michael Coles describes in this episode, awareness of those moments, and having tools to capture and learn from them, is what makes the difference over time.

What is neurodivergent parent burnout?

Neurodivergent parent burnout is the cumulative exhaustion that comes from managing your own neurological needs while meeting the intensive support demands of neurodivergent children. It differs from general parenting burnout because the parent's own nervous system is also under strain, often without adequate support. Shutdown moments, like the theme park experience Michael describes, are often early signals. Recognising these as information rather than failure is a meaningful first step toward sustainable support.

What does parenting neurodivergent children as a neurodivergent adult actually look like?

It looks different week to week, as Michael puts it plainly in this episode. Each child has distinct sensitivities, what regulates one may not touch the other, and the parent's own rhythms and limits are part of the picture too. Parenting neurodivergent children as a neurodivergent adult means navigating unpredictability without a reliable baseline, often while undiagnosed or under-supported yourself. Tools that reduce cognitive load and help surface patterns can make a meaningful difference. You can explore how Understanding Zoe supports the whole family.

TL;DR

Being a neurodivergent parent of neurodivergent children is one of the most layered experiences in modern family life, and one of the least supported. Michael Coles, autistic ADHDer and host of the Deep Dive Podcast, shares how neurodivergent parenting changes when you start capturing overwhelming moments rather than just surviving them. Those moments become patterns, and patterns become plans. As he puts it: "I'm not the perfect parent", and that honesty is itself a form of advocacy. Supporting yourself is not separate from supporting your child. It is foundational to it.