What’s With All The Moms Getting Diagnosed With ADHD?

More and more moms are getting diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) alongside their children, saying that when they saw what their kids were going through, something just clicked.

The New York Post shared the story of one woman, Cassie Blakely, who was diagnosed at 37 — all because she recognized things from her own childhood as her daughters went through the process of getting answers for themselves: “I realized through them … watching both of my daughters struggle kind of felt like my own childhood was being repeated in front of me.”

Blakely is one of many adults living with ADHD — which is officially classified as a neurodevelopmental condition that can change how the brain is able to regulate things like focus, attention, impulse control, and physical activity — and the number of adult diagnoses has grown dramatically in recent years, nearly doubling between 2018 and 2023 to over 15 million.

So why the explosion in diagnoses? Many of the adults being diagnosed in recent years grew up in the 1980s and 1990s — when such diagnoses were relatively scarce, particularly among women. In the 1980s, approximately one child in 20 was diagnosed with the condition — but current numbers are closer to one in nine.

The major factors driving increased diagnoses among children include greater awareness of the condition itself, better diagnostic tools, and a broader range of indicators that can trigger further examination.

For example, in the 1980s, the typical ADHD case was most likely a boy who routinely displayed behavior that was disruptive enough to land him in the principal’s office at school.

But because girls with ADHD typically present with different symptoms — they’re often inattentive rather than disruptive — they were simply labeled as “lazy.” Teachers and parents would lament that the girls were smart, but still somehow failing to live up to their obvious potential. Girls who were dismissed as daydreamers or space cadets were struggling internally with other ADHD symptoms like executive dysfunction — meaning that they could fully understand how to execute a task but feel paralyzed when it came to either starting the task or seeing it through to completion.

Diagnoses were also missed in part because the parenting landscape was very different in the 1980s and 1990s. The Baby Boomers were raising children during those decades, and most of them had been raised by World War II veterans and survivors of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, meaning that they had all been taught to tough things out — and expected the same from their own children.

Inattentiveness or daydreaming — which today might be flagged as a sign of executive dysfunction — was written off as laziness. Physically acting out was often, at least at first, attributed to a lack of discipline or respect.

Children were different in those decades as well — raised primarily without technology, they were often expected to entertain themselves and encouraged to solve their own problems. Many found ways to mask their ADHD symptoms, either by becoming perfectionists or by procrastinating and relying on adrenaline surges to help them get things done at the last minute.

So what is the benefit of getting a diagnosis years later? Many of the children who slipped through the diagnostic cracks in the 1980s and 1990s grew up feeling like they had done something wrong. After years of being called “lazy” or being told that they just needed to work harder, they can finally get some answers that explain why their brains did not function the same way other kids’ brains did.