Meredith Carder's mother used to say she was an angel at school and a devil at home.

Meredith was a good student and a very good reader. She also came home with nail marks in her palms from clenching her hands all the time to keep her body still. She had headaches that no one could explain. Her parents were looking for an answer and never found one. We're talking the 80s and 90s, and there simply weren't that many people looking for ADHD in a girl who was a good student.

She wasn't diagnosed until her own daughter was. She was filling out her daughter's forms and kept seeing herself on the page.

October is ADHD Awareness Month, so I wanted to have Meredith on the show. She's an ADHD coach and author of It All Makes Sense Now. She's also a mom of three, and two of her children have ADHD. We discussed something that I think a lot of families are experiencing and just don't have a name for yet: masking.

Masking is when a child works extremely hard to appear “normal” by hiding what their brain and body actually require them to do. They quickly learn that fidgeting or getting up to move will get them corrected, so they find all sorts of workarounds. That takes a massive amount of energy. By the time they walk through your front door, the tank is completely empty. And “normal” is often defined as what is societally acceptable for neurotypical individuals. 

You might have come across the concept of “restraint collapse,” where the child can hold it in at school and then lets it all out at home, because home feels safe. That's a fairly common phenomenon. With a child with ADHD who has been masking for seven hours straight, the collapse can be considerably more severe, and it doesn't just “even out” once they've gotten used to the new classroom.

Boys are diagnosed with ADHD almost twice as often as girls (15% v 8% according to the CDC). Meredith believes a lot of that gap is down to what we expect of kids. Boys are told to go climb a tree and get their wiggles out. Girls are told to sit nicely. They learn to hide it.

There's also a catch with how ADHD is diagnosed. The symptoms must be present in more than one setting, and the teacher completes part of the form. If the child is masking really well, the teacher may very genuinely see nothing at all, and that can effectively put a diagnosis off for years.

As a pediatrician, I see a lot of kids with stomachaches and headaches where there's absolutely nothing we can find as a medical cause. Once we've ruled out the things we need to rule out, we start to ask what's going on in their world. Stress without an outlet often manifests in the body.

Meredith sees where this is all going. She's worked with kids who over-apologize and only raise their hand when they're absolutely certain they're right. She's worked with adults who grew up masking and are still people-pleasing and burning out time and again.

A kid who's holding it together all day is not necessarily a kid who's okay.

Meredith pointed out that a masking kid is often an easier kid to parent. Her mom would just put a hand on her knee if she was bouncing it. Meredith has had to confront the fact that she's done the same with her own kids. She says it with such compassion, and that's how I want you to hear it.

What helps is giving that need somewhere to go. My son is a tumbler, and he used to keep knocking over his little sister. We finally gave him a spot to tumble into. He still got his tumbling out, and nobody got flattened. The wiggles have to go somewhere, and we just get to help decide where.

Meredith outlines the subtle signs of masking that parents and teachers often overlook, and how to tell the difference between a harmless quirk and a genuine pattern worth investigating. She also describes a simple classroom intervention that proved so effective for her daughter that the teacher later implemented it for the entire class. She also explains how she taught her children to ask for what they needed. And if you're seeing yourself in all of this, she tells you what the very first thing she'd do would be.

Still not sure whether your kid's post-school meltdowns are the norm or are actually a sign of masking? That's precisely what this episode is about.

Listen to my full conversation with Meredith Carder over on the podcast. Follow her on Instagram @hummingbird_adhd, check out her Substack (It All Makes Sense Now: ADHD Insights), and get her book It All Makes Sense Now: Embrace Your ADHD Brain to Live a Creative and Colorful Life.

I am so grateful that you continue to make space for these conversations. If the podcast has been helpful to you, leaving a review wherever you listen is one of the simplest ways to help more parents find the show.

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