Chapter one
The parent on the kitchen floor
I want to start with a night I don't talk about very often.
My child had said something that broke my heart — one of those things ADHD children say in the heat of a terrible moment that lands in your chest and stays there. And after everyone was asleep, I sat on the kitchen floor and I cried.
Not because I didn't love them. But because I loved them so much, and I had tried everything I could find, and nothing was working, and I was so tired of feeling like I was failing the person I loved most in the world.
What I didn't know then — sitting on that floor — was that the problem wasn't me. The problem was that everything I'd been given to work with was built around managing ADHD symptoms, not understanding the whole family system that ADHD lives inside.
I was treating behavior problems. But what my family needed was root-up understanding.
Chapter two
The double layer nobody talks about
Here's something that makes my situation — and maybe yours — particularly complicated.
I have ADHD myself.
Which means that when my child struggled, I wasn't just watching it from the outside. I was feeling it from the inside too. The same executive function battles. The same emotional intensity. The same inner critic that says I'm not enough in a hundred different ways.
Parenting a child with ADHD when you also have ADHD is something most resources don't acknowledge at all. But it's real — and it's heavy. When your child voices the same thoughts you've carried about yourself your entire life, it activates your own pain in ways that make it nearly impossible to stay regulated for them.
The work I do with families now always includes this: the parent is not just the helper. The parent is also, often, someone who needs support. And that's not a weakness. That's one of the most important truths about ADHD family life that nobody says out loud.
Chapter three
Why I became a coach
I didn't set out to be a coach. I set out to help my own family.
When I finally found the right framework — one that looked at the whole family, that started with understanding instead of strategy, that met people where they actually were instead of where the textbooks expected them to be — everything shifted. Not overnight. But steadily, sustainably, for real.
And I couldn't stop thinking about all the other parents still on their kitchen floors.
The ones Googling at midnight. The ones who've tried everything and can't understand why nothing sticks. The ones whose child has just said something heartbreaking and they don't know what to say. The ones who have ADHD themselves and feel the weight of their own history every time their child struggles.
I became a coach because I had been in the dark, found a way through, and couldn't stand the idea of other families navigating it alone.
It's built on a transformation framework that takes families through five stages — from Awareness to Achievement — at their own pace, with the right support at each step. It's not a library of tips. It's a map. And I walk every family through it.
Because this is the thing I know with absolute certainty after everything I've lived and everything I've witnessed coaching other families:
You are not failing your child. You just haven't had the right map yet.
— Laurie