Why My Autism Training Is Hitting Closer to Home Than I Expected (As a Parent With ADHD)

Melbourne · Parenting & ADHD · Early Childhood

I signed up for the Certified Autism Clinical Specialist Intensive Training over a year ago now. Still chewing through it, if I’m honest. Some weeks I don’t open the laptop at all, the whole thing just sits there and I lose interest. Other weeks something clicks and I want to smash through four modules in a single sitting, cold cup of tea going untouched next to me until midnight. There’s no real rhythm to it.

I told myself at the start it was for work. I’m a support worker here in Melbourne, with a PhD in early childhood, and I run a little site on child development and activities that leans heavily into special needs topics because that’s where most of my questions actually live. I figured this training would sharpen what I already do with the kids I work with, the ones who melt down when the noise of a busy room gets too much, the ones who need three warnings before a transition, not one.

That was the plan, anyway.

Somewhere in there, I stopped taking notes for the kids I support and started taking notes for myself.

I have ADHD. Diagnosed later than I’d like to admit, well into adulthood, after years of just assuming I was disorganised, too sensitive, too much. I’m 47 now, and my daughter’s 23, so a lot of what the training brings up for me isn’t really about today, it’s memory.

I’ll be reading a module on sensory overwhelm and suddenly I’m back at the school pickup line at 3.15, the hum of other parents’ conversations, her tugging at my sleeve wanting to go home already, and that particular kind of static that used to build in my head when there was too much coming at me at once.

Nobody really talks about how much autism and ADHD overlap in daily life, even though they’re different things entirely. The trouble winding down at night. The way a change in plans can feel like the floor dropping out from under you. The sheer effort it takes some days just to start a task, any task, even one you want to do.

When I read through the training content now, I’m not just picturing the kids I support through the week. I’m picturing myself in my thirties, driving home from work with the radio off because I couldn’t handle one more input, and not understanding why.

That same brain does something else too, though, something less obvious. Give it a task it doesn’t care about and it can barely get off the ground. Give it something that genuinely interests it and it’ll chew through the whole thing at speed, no starting line problem at all.

Years back I did a digital marketing training certificate on a whim, something completely outside early childhood, and ended up as a digital marketing manager for a stretch. It challenged me in a way that actually suited how my head works, and working from home suited it even more, no open office noise, no forced small talk pulling my attention sideways.

That’s always been how I’ve moved through the world, hyperfocus dressed up as ambition. It’s only looking back now that I can see the ADHD running underneath all of it the whole time, this same brain that’s currently chewing through an autism training module in fits and starts, exactly the way it’s always chewed through anything that interests me.

One thing that’s properly shifted for me is how I think about self-regulation. I used to think of it as something you teach a child, like tying shoelaces or saying please and thank you. Something you build in them. But it turns out children borrow their calm from the adults around them before they ever learn to find it themselves.

That sounds obvious when you say it out loud. It gets a lot less obvious at 5pm on a Wednesday when your own nervous system has been firing all day, your inbox is a mess, the trams were running late, and now you’re meant to be a steady, grounding presence for a small person who’s had just as big a day as you have, in their own way.

I’ve had to sit with that. Properly sit with it, not just nod along to a slide about co-regulation and move on to the next module.

Being a parent with ADHD comes with a particular kind of guilt that nobody warns you about. I’d forget the excursion form, then remember it exists at 11pm the night before, not that morning when it would’ve actually helped. I’d mean to be patient and then my own tank would be empty, and I’d snap over something small, and afterwards sit there replaying it, wondering why I couldn’t just hold it together for five more minutes.

You’re meant to be the calm one, the regulated one, the person your kid borrows their steadiness from. Some days I genuinely couldn’t offer that, not because I didn’t want to, but because my own nervous system got there first and used up whatever calm was going around. That’s a hard thing to admit out loud, even to yourself.

There was also the load of running a household when your brain isn’t wired for the kind of admin that parenting demands. Appointments, forms, routines, the mental list that never actually gets written down anywhere and just sits there humming in the background. I wasn’t lazy and I wasn’t careless, I was just doing all of it with a brain that had to work twice as hard for things that seemed to come easily to other parents.

And underneath all of it, there was the guilt of knowing my kid had inherited some of this from me. I’d watch her struggle to start her homework and some part of me recognised exactly what that felt like from the inside, and I couldn’t decide if that made me better equipped to help her or just more aware of how much we were both carrying.

The course spends a lot of time on building resilience slowly, on predictable routines, on making sure a child feels emotionally safe before you even think about teaching them anything. None of that is groundbreaking if you’ve spent any real time in early childhood work.

What’s different is thinking back on how we actually lived it at home, with my daughter, who’s had ADHD the whole way through. Her biggest struggle was never sitting still or listening, it was starting things. Getting dressed for school, starting homework, even starting something she genuinely wanted to do, like drawing or getting ready for a friend’s birthday party.

She’d sit there stuck at the starting line while I stood there getting frustrated, forgetting for a second that starting tasks is hard for me too, I’d just had thirty odd more years to build workarounds for it.

She’s 23 now, a bright, hardworking young woman who still tells me starting is the hard part, whatever the task, whatever the stakes. Finishing was never her issue. Getting off the mark was.

These days she’ll be dressing for work five minutes before she’s meant to walk out the door, every single time, and when I ask her about it she just laughs and says she likes the rush of it, the adrenaline of cutting it that fine. I used to think that was just her being disorganised. Now I think it’s her nervous system finding the one condition urgent enough to actually get her moving.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with a brain that won’t switch off. I’ll close the laptop after a training module and keep going over it in my head hours later, turning it this way and that, connecting it to something my daughter said to me on the phone last week, something a colleague mentioned in passing, some memory from when she was small that I hadn’t thought about in years.

Learning doesn’t really stop for me when the module ends. It just goes underground and keeps working. Some nights that’s a gift. Other nights it’s the reason I’m still awake at midnight when I have a 6am start.

The training, like most professional training, assumes a bit more consistency than real life actually offers. Apply the strategy. Follow the framework. Build the routine and stick to it. Fair enough, in theory.

But in a house where one of you has ADHD and the other is figuring out her own version of it, some days everything clicks, the regulation works, the connection feels easy. Other days it all feels harder than it has any right to be, and you’re left wondering what you did wrong, when the honest answer is probably nothing. That’s just how it goes some days.

What I’m noticing changing in myself, slowly, not all at once and not perfectly, is a bit more awareness before I react. A better sense of how quickly things escalate when I bring my own frazzled state into a moment that didn’t need it.

An understanding that how I’m doing matters just as much as how she’s doing, that we’re not separate equations, we’re the same one.

And maybe the biggest shift is starting to pull apart behaviour from identity, both for her and for me. When she’s stuck at the starting line of something, unable to get moving even on things she likes, that’s not laziness and it’s not defiance, whatever it might look like from the outside.

She’s not “difficult.” I’m not “too much.” We’re both just working with brains that process the world a certain way, and most days we’re doing our best with what we’ve got.

Training gives you the knowledge but it doesn’t touch the tiredness. It wouldn’t have made the school run easier or shortened the meltdowns back then, and it doesn’t quiet the noise in my own head now.

What it does, if you let it, is change the question you’re asking. Instead of why is this so hard, you start asking what’s actually going on underneath this. That’s a small shift on paper. It’s felt like a fairly big one in practice.

I’m not trying to get everything right. I’ve stopped expecting that of myself, mostly. I’m just trying to slow down before I react, support the regulation before I expect the behaviour, start small rather than aiming for consistency I can’t yet manage, and notice when my own state is part of what’s happening in the room, not separate from it.

Because in a house like ours, support was never going to run in one direction only. It moves both ways, all the time, whether we planned for that or not.

I started this training thinking it would make me better at my job. It has. But it’s also quietly rewritten how I understand my own family, sitting here in Melbourne with the washing still on the line and another module waiting to be opened.

It’s shown me the gap between what our kids need and what we’re actually able to give on any given day, especially when we’re both still figuring out how our own minds work.

That gap, as it turns out, is where most of the real growth has happened. Not in the perfect strategy. In the small, half-aware moments that slowly change how we show up, for our kids, and for ourselves.