Parenting

Co-Parenting After Divorce: A Guide for ADHD Families

Managing your child’s ADHD medications, homework, and doctor visits across households takes cooperation and consistency. Make the transitions easier with these tips.

Merriam Saunders
By Merriam R. Sarcia Saunders, LMFT, Verified Updated on January 31, 2024
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The gold standard for a great divorce when you have kids with ADHD is one in which both parents are working together, amicably. In an ideal world, all parents adopt the same healthy approach to managing ADHD, along with the same schedule and routine.

But this smooth, coordinated ideal is difficult to achieve when co-parenting children with ADHD after divorce.

Co-Parenting Challenges: Separate Homes, Different Rules

We know that children with ADHD have executive functioning challenges. Divorce may heighten those struggles largely because the prefrontal cortex, the command center for executive functioning, is now also trying to manage frequent transitions amid a changing family dynamic.

Transitioning between home, school, and another home brings changes in routine and possible parental conflict. Witnessing family strife can lead to behavior regression, a loss of previously developed skills, increased defiance and lying, and arguing as a means of communication because that is what has been modeled for children.

It’s possible that a child’s ADHD may be ignored or managed poorly in one home. Each parent might have their own schedule, with their own set of rules, and this can lead to academic challenges, lost items, and a generally chaotic life for the child. This can also exacerbate ADHD symptoms.

[Read: The ADHD Co-Parenting Guide to Consistent Treatment]

With a co-parenting plan in place, you can provide your child with the support and structure they need to ease into a new routine.

Co-Parenting a Child with ADHD: How to Make It Work

1. Follow similar schedules to stay consistent across two homes. For example, when your child comes home from school, it’s snack time and some downtime, then homework, then TV. Bedtime is at the same time in both homes. Likewise, both houses have the same rules and the same reward systems.

2. Think twice about mid-week transitions. In a neurotypical divorce, we recommend that younger children have more frequent contact with both parents. For example, Parent A has Monday and Tuesday, and drops off the child at school Wednesday morning. Parent B picks up the child Wednesday afternoon and has the child Thursday and Friday, and they alternate weekends. When the child reaches middle school and beyond, we tend to recommend a week-on, week-off schedule. Children at that age can go for longer stretches of time without seeing the other parent because they’ve already formed the essential bonds and attachments.

In a neurodivergent situation, that midweek transition might be a nightmare. It might not be ideal for a third- or fourth-grader to go to another home every Wednesday — for all the reasons you can imagine. Your child has to remember what to bring from home to school and back to another home. Homework projects get lost. Other things get lost. There’s a lot of shuffling.

[Read: How to Smooth the Time & Space Between Daily Activities]

If your child’s ADHD symptoms are worsening, or you see regression or increased defiance for a period of six months, you might suggest to the other parent, “Until our child is a bit older, midweek transitions might not be beneficial. We might need our child to be in one home for the school week with frequent access to the other parent.” So, maybe dinners twice a week with the other parent would work.

3. Establish rituals to ease transitions, especially for younger children. For example, your child knows that when Parent A picks them up, it’s going to be a kiss on the cheek and a hug. Parent A sings the same song, reads the same book, or goes for ice cream at the same place. Whatever the routine, the child can always count on it. Parent B can have their own ritual, but the child will find it comforting if the routine is dependable.

4. Use shared calendars. Having a visual representation of a calendar in your home with pictures of Parent A’s house and Parent B’s house on colored stickies helps your child visualize the structure of the week. This can also help to quell anxiety around, “Where am I going? What am I doing? When am I going there?”

5. Decide whether your child’s medications travel back and forth with them, or whether there should be medications available in both homes. The last thing you want is for your child to be without their medication.

6. When communicating with doctors, teachers, and therapists, always copy the co-parent in emails or let them know about conversations and outcomes. An informed co-parent is in the best interest of your child.

A Co-Parenting Plan When Divorce Is Imminent

If you are in a situation in which divorce is imminent, I highly recommend that you work with a mediator therapist, as opposed to a mediator attorney, to create an extensive parenting plan that covers topics beyond the custody schedule.

When you’re working with attorneys, the custody schedule — including who gets which school holidays — is typically top of mind. But by addressing other aspects of the co-parenting relationship in the beginning, you can eliminate a decade of conflict.

When I work with parents in a divorce situation, we come up with a 30-page document. It includes what happens when we have long-term homework projects; when we introduce a significant other to our child; when we have extracurricular activities; and so on. Creating this parenting plan means diving into nearly everything, and it will be the blueprint for the upcoming years.

If you’re already divorced, you can still write a co-parenting plan now and have your co-parent work with you. This gives you both a roadmap to manage situations as they come up.

Co-Parenting Children with ADHD: Next Steps

Merriam Sarcia Saunders, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and child custody recommending counselor within the family court system.

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