Children Suck at Body Doubling

There is a strategy people often recommend for ADHD called body doubling.

The idea is simple—another person sits quietly nearby while you complete a task.

They don’t help. They don’t talk. They just exist in the room. Apparently another calm nervous system makes it easier to focus.

In theory…it’s brilliant. In practice, the only people regularly in the room with me are my children. Which means what I have is less of a body double and more of a multi-person sensory situation.

My oldest vocal stims. Not loudly. Just…persistently. Like a tiny radio permanently tuned to one very specific station. And because I have echolalia, my brain quietly borrows pieces of the broadcast. Certain phrases get stuck.

Sometimes…they come back out wearing my voice.

My youngest doesn’t really believe in sitting still. She orbits the living room like a tiny moon around an invisible planet. Every few minutes she stops because she’s remembered something the rest of us absolutely need to know.

One afternoon she says, “Did you know octopuses have three hearts?”

I say, “I did not.”

Then she says, “Did you know they’re only missing one trait that would let them build their own civilization?”

Now I’m invested. “What trait?”

She thinks for a second. “I’m not exactly sure…but I think it’s the fact that once they have babies they die.”

Sounds about right.

Then she keeps walking around the room as if she hasn’t just detonated an existential crisis in the middle of Tuesday afternoon.

Because…that feels strangely true. Not about octopuses. About parents. No one tells you that the version of yourself who existed before children quietly disappears too.

The person who could recover in silence. The person who could build life around one nervous system. The person whose survival adaptations actually worked.

I think that’s why parenthood can feel like such an identity crisis for neurodivergent adults.

We don’t just become parents. We lose access to many of the adaptations that made us appear highly functional in the first place.

For years I thought motherhood had broken me. Now I think something else happened. The environment I’d spent decades engineering around my nervous system simply stopped existing. The rules changed. And none of the old answers worked anymore.

It felt like grief. Not because I became less myself. But because the version of myself I knew how to be could no longer survive under those conditions.

Except…that isn’t really the end of the story. Because something else emerged. Not a better version. Not a more selfless version.

Just…Mom.

A nervous system that somehow learned to hear three conversations at once. To notice hunger before someone else does. To keep functioning—not through control—but through relationship.

Later that afternoon I’m looking for a missing shoe when I hear myself say, “Three hearts.”

My kids look at me. “Mom. You just repeated that out loud.”

Apparently I did. My brain had quietly held onto exactly one piece of the conversation.

Three hearts.

Echolalia is not always repetition. Sometimes it’s recognition. As if my nervous system notices something before my conscious mind understands why it matters.

Three hearts. Three nervous systems. Three completely different ways of moving through the world.

Three hearts trying to become a family.

Before I had children, I thought executive functioning happened inside my brain. Parenting taught me that it also happens between nervous systems.

The productivity world taught me to ask, How can I control my environment enough to function?

My children taught me a different question. How can we stay connected enough that everyone can function?

Which…now that I think about it…probably still counts as body doubling.

Just not the quiet kind.

By Mandy Parida