Your child’s ADHD may be the one you can see. Here is how to care for the brain doing the parenting.
ADHD often runs in families. A 2019 review of 37 twin studies estimated its heritability at 74 percent. So the mother sitting beside her child in the specialist’s office may have more in common with that child than anyone has thought to ask.
Vanessa Barmpa was that mother. As she puts it on her profile, she was “hyper-focused on my ND son for years before I found out the missing piece was mine.” Her own ADHD was diagnosed later in life, reflecting a wider pattern in the research: women are often identified later than men, sometimes after years of compensating, pushing through, or being understood through other explanations first.
But for Vanessa, the more important shift was not the diagnosis itself. It was learning to look underneath behaviour, both her son’s and her own, with more curiosity and less judgement.
She now works with mothers who are often carrying a similar load: trying to understand their child, manage family life, meet the demands of work, and keep everything moving, while rarely stopping to ask what they themselves need.
Her work is not about giving mothers another set of rules to follow or asking them to try harder. It is about helping them understand what is actually happening, make choices from that understanding, and support their children without disappearing from their own lives.
What follows is not a story about mothers who are failing. It is about what becomes possible when understanding replaces judgement, and a mother begins making room for herself inside the life she is working so hard to hold together.
From the Diary of Vanessa Barmpa
Vanessa Barmpa is a Netherlands-based ADHD Life Coach and the ADHD Mom’s Coach. Her work focuses on mothers raising children with ADHD, as well as ADHD moms who want support for themselves, helping them understand what sits underneath behaviour, let go of guilt, and care for their children without losing themselves. Before coaching, she spent more than 20 years in technology and leadership roles, ultimately leading global finance technology, and she holds the International Coaching Federation’s Associate Certified Coach credential.
When Trying Harder Isn’t the Answer
The women who book a call with Vanessa are rarely short of information. They can talk about executive function, medication, school accommodations and the specialists they have seen. Many run demanding jobs. They are, in her words, “strong, resilient women” who “do not give up easily.”
That strength is what hides the problem.
At work, a senior role already asks for planning, prioritizing and constant switching between demands. Then she comes home to a second shift of the same load: school communication, appointments, routines, homework, forgotten belongings, and a child who may need far more support than others the same age. If she has ADHD herself, Vanessa points out, she may be “trying to provide executive-function support for her child using the very functions that are also demanding more effort from her.”
For an expat, add an unfamiliar school system, another language, and none of the family support she might have had at home. Vanessa, a Greek woman who built her career in the Netherlands, knows that layer from the inside.
What I see is not women who aren’t trying hard enough. Quite the opposite. They are often trying extraordinarily hard.
So when something fails, the instinct is more of the same. Vanessa’s point is that the question itself needs to change, from “How can I try harder?” to “What is actually being asked of me here, what do I need to support this, and what do I need for myself?”
The Hour a Week and the Rest of the Week
A significant shift in her own understanding started with a simple realization about her son.
Eventually I realized that the professionals supporting us might see my child for an hour a week, but I was the person living beside him every day. If I wanted to support him differently, I needed to understand ADHD differently. That realization changed not only how I saw my son, but also how I saw myself.
That meant seeing executive function as more than remembering appointments. It covers starting, planning, working memory, impulse control and emotional regulation, and when those are strained, the outside view reads as laziness or defiance. The mother’s question shifts, Vanessa says, from “Why won’t they just do it?” to “What is making this hard right now?”
Then came the harder discovery. Her own diagnosis turned years of what she had filed as “personal shortcomings” into something that made sense. As a single parent, she wrote on her profile, she had tried to fix her son, fix herself, fix it all. “In the end I stopped trying to fix and chose to understand.”
That is where her International Coaching Federation training earns its place.
Coaching is not about me becoming another expert telling a mother what she should do. There are already enough voices doing that. My role is to create the space for her to notice what is happening, question assumptions, understand what she needs and make choices that fit her values, her child and the life they are actually living.
Two Questions About a Gym Bag
For four years, her son forgot his gym bag almost every week. The teacher was angry, and the blame arrived for Vanessa through the school app.
After a while, she has written, she was no longer thinking “He forgot his gym bag.” She was thinking “You don’t listen. You don’t care. You could remember if you tried.”
That experience taught her to separate two things: “What actually happened?” and “What did I decide it meant?”
The first is a fact. The second is a verdict, and the verdict drives the shouting, the guilt and the next battle. After years of the same fight, separating the two can be difficult because the verdict can begin to feel like the fact.
She adds a third question for the days when yesterday went fine and today did not: “What made it possible yesterday?” It turns an accusation (“you did it before”) into a search for the conditions that worked.
None of this means dropping expectations. “The struggle can be real,” she wrote recently. “The boundary can still stand.”
The Same Brain Goes to Work
Her work with ADHD families is not a leadership framework, but one principle travels easily between motherhood and leadership: “understanding before judgement.”
When someone is struggling at work, the first question is often how to improve performance. Vanessa would begin somewhere else: what is getting in the way, what support is missing, and what in the environment might need to change?
She applies the same test to women leading themselves. Many women with ADHD have built careers by overcompensating, overpreparing, working longer and masking. “That can create impressive results,” she says, “but it is not sustainable.”
What she sees change in coaching is not output. Her clients already know how to achieve. The shift is that a woman who arrived looking outside herself for the next answer begins to trust herself again, and it follows her into the office. She becomes clearer about what she can take on, more direct about what she needs, and less likely, as Vanessa puts it, “to measure her value by how much she can carry.”
“Self-leadership, for me, begins when we stop measuring our strength by how much we can endure and start understanding what allows us to function well,” she says.
Why Vanessa Barmpa
Vanessa brings together professional coaching, ADHD knowledge and lived experience.
Before becoming a coach, she spent more than 20 years in technology and leadership roles, ultimately leading global finance technology. That experience gave her an inside view of demanding professional environments, high responsibility and the pressure many capable women place on themselves to keep performing, even when the cost is high.
She trained as a Certified ADHD Life Coach through the International ADHD Coach Training Center, earned her International Coaching Federation Associate Certified Coach credential, and completed additional training as an ADHD and Executive Function Parent Coach.
But the work is personal too.
Vanessa is a late-diagnosed woman with ADHD and a mother raising a child with ADHD. Her own journey changed when she stopped asking how to fix herself or her son and began trying to understand what was actually happening.
As she has written, “I found the peace I craved.”
That combination of lived experience, coaching training and professional leadership shapes the way she works today: direct, curious and without judgement, helping mothers understand ADHD while also making room for themselves inside the story.
Where Vanessa Is Now
Vanessa lives in the Netherlands, where she offers one-to-one coaching and live group sessions for mothers raising children with ADHD.
She is raising her son while building a life that feels more like her own.
She writes, works, drinks coffee before it gets cold when she can, and keeps returning to the same questions she asks the women she coaches: What matters to me? What do I need? What kind of life am I actually trying to build?
After years of measuring herself by how much she could manage, solve and carry, she is more interested now in something quieter: presence, choice and enough space to hear herself think.
Her picture of success is deliberately ordinary. As she has written, “Peace is an ordinary Tuesday. But you make a coffee. You sit down. It is still hot.”
From Vanessa: “Five Shifts for Supporting ADHD Without Disappearing”
- Stop answering ‘difficulty’ with ‘effort’. Ask what is actually being asked of you before you try harder.
- Separate the event from the verdict. Write down what happened, then what you decided it meant.
- Ask what worked yesterday. Look for the conditions that made it possible instead of the proof that they could.
- Keep the boundary and the empathy. Understanding why something is hard does not require erasing the limit.
- Put yourself inside the picture. Your needs belong in the decisions, at home and at work.
Vanessa Barmpa coaches mothers raising children with ADHD and ADHD moms who want support for themselves.
