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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP, I was the one who made the coparenting comment. The compulsory parts of parenting (laundry! Schedule! Chores! Good!) are the ones that happen over and over on a schedule that’s not fungible. So by definition, a spouse that can’t pull their fair share of weight in those areas is not coparenting equally. Sure, the traits you describe are important to parenting, but they’re not exclusive to people with ADHD and frankly many people with ADHD who do have talents in those areas have trouble deploying those emotional resources in a timely and effective way if there is any other practical demand on their plate.

So I will stand by my comment that ADHD parents are not equal coparents. They can be good parents for sure- no one here is arguing about that- but their deficits mean that their fellow parent will not have an equal partner in the work of parenting their children.[/quote]

I am the PP to whom you're responding.

With sincere respect, I disagree. Sorry this is another info dump-- it's hard to have a real back-and-forth in shorter comments on DCUM.

There's sort of a constellation of interrelated issues I have with your comment.

First, much of what you describe are more... household management activities, or activities of daily living (laundry! chores!) They are greater when you live with another human, and then exponentially greater when you have small humans to take care of in your household, as well, but they are not exclusive to parenting. You are correct in a general sense that these always come harder to people with ADHD almost by definition-- most require a fair bit of consistent executive function. But what you're describing is a lot like anything that is exaggerated/exacerbated/brought into stark relief when people become parents... but always existed beforehand. It's important! It ends up being a lot of the extra work that comes with parenting, so it's a very fair point. But it's not IMO even the majority of the work of parenting, itself.

Maybe it seems like a semantic quibble, but I don't think so, because there are important parts of parenting that are exclusive to parenting that people with ADHD are [i]more likely to[/i] excel at. For example, in teaching your child-- which is, in fact, exclusive to parenting-- being willing to admit when you're wrong, to see things from your child's perspective, to open up worlds for them, come up with creative activities, and so on. Again, not everyone with ADHD is awesome in all these ways, but not everyone with ADHD is near-useless at managing a household or setting boundaries. Especially more likely that moms with ADHD are halfway decent at those household management things.

I have ADHD. My husband also has ADHD. We are pretty equal parents, though I'd say it's leans more like 55-60% me*, when it comes to time and energy spent, especially if you include all the household/scheduling stuff.

I am... a woman.

I have female friends with ADHD who are married to NT men, and most of them do even more of the "work of parenting" than I do. So the gender imbalance may be a bigger factor than the ADHD IMO... Intersecting with the fact that women with ADHD feel more obligated to compensate for their shortcomings. If you want to say it's very likely that a man with ADHD is not going to equally co-parent-- both including and excluding chores/household management-- I'd agree that's very very very likely true, at least on a population level.

But then, your comment in general seems almost tautological (maybe not the word I want).

"Yes, people with ADHD are more likely to have gifts, but some people have those gifts without the accompanying deficits." I mean, sure. And some people have, for practical purposes, the approximate deficits of ADHD and don't have the attendant gifts.

But, sure, it's undeniably true that there exist people who are excellent at all aspects of parenting. I'm sure they make amazing coparents.

But most people are just adequate (+/-) at most/all aspects.

I'm just not sure I buy that this makes overall-adequate [i]per se[/i] better parents than people who have some great gifts and some significant deficits. Probably easier for a lot of people to coparent with! (Including you, I'd guess.) But I'm not sure qualitatively better.

If you want to say that people whose skills used in parenting are all-around-awesome make better parents than both "average" parents and ADHD parents, sure, of course. But that awesome group is small.

Just because there exist some exceptional, doubly-gifted people doesn't mean that anyone not in that group is inadequate [i]as a rule[/i], though. Individuals, sure, but I don't think I agree parents with ADHD are inadequately equal coparents as a rule. It sounds like that's true in your household (no shade)-- and probably in a lot of ADHD man/NT woman households-- but I'm not sure why it would have to be among all ADHD parents.

*A real 55-60%, if you actually take out a spreadsheet-- not the 55-60% a lot of women claim because the DH does more than their fathers, but is actually like 75-80%.[/quote]

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