Why Self-Care Feels Impossible For Mothers When Their Neurodivergent Child Is In Burnout

(And Why There Isn’t Anything Wrong With You)

When my neurodivergent teen went into burnout, my world fell apart, and in its place, a smaller, more constricted reality emerged.

It was like having a newborn in the family again, except this time, the stakes felt terrifyingly high.

Her needs were loud, all-consuming, and urgent. I put my career on hold. My dreams. My sense of self.

I became her full-time carer, willingly and instinctively, because that is what love asked of me in that moment.

From the outside, though, it looked very different.

She spent long periods of time in her room, and my other two children were at school most of the day.
To an observer, it probably looked like I had “time on my hands.”

But inside, I was shell-shocked.

After nearly losing her to a suicide attempt and the hospitalisation that followed, my nervous system shifted into a strange, paralysing state I didn’t yet have language for. I lived in anticipatory waiting mode, constantly alert, constantly scanning, constantly braced for the next moment I might be needed.

I couldn’t rest.
I couldn’t focus.
I couldn’t do anything that didn’t somehow orbit her care.

Even when she was quiet.
Even when nothing was “happening.”

And then came the questions.

Friends and family would ask, “How are you?” but not really want the answer.
This was often followed by:
“What are you doing for yourself?” or “Make sure you’re taking time for self-care.”

On the surface, this advice sounds caring. Logical, even.

But in my body, it felt impossible.

Why Self-Care Feels so Hard, Especially for Mothers of Neurodivergent Kids in Burnout

Here’s what I wish someone had told me back then, and what you might need to hear if this is your current reality, too.

This isn’t a motivation problem.
It isn’t a failure of boundaries.
And it isn’t because you don’t value yourself enough.

It’s deeper than that.

1. Your Nervous System is Organised Around Protection

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory helps us understand waiting mode not as anxiety or hypervigilance alone, but as a biological caregiving state.

When a child is in burnout, especially following crisis or hospitalisation, a mother’s nervous system often becomes the external regulator for the whole family.

I felt blindsided by my daughter’s burnout, and I internalised the crisis our family was in as my fault. I told myself I had “dropped the ball,” that I hadn’t been prepared enough. Over time, my body learned a quiet, protective rule:

“If I relax, something bad could happen.”

This response can become especially intense for mothers when:

• Your child is distressed, withdrawn, or dysregulated.
• You have received subtle or overt messages that you are the buffer between your child and harm

This is love and deep care for our children, but it is also responsibility fused with fear, and that sense of responsibility is not evenly distributed across genders.

So even when there is time, your system doesn’t experience it as safe time.

Rest requires predictability and permission and burnout offers neither.

What looks like “not prioritising yourself” is often a nervous system organised around protection.

If you are nodding along to these words, please know that this response didn’t come from weakness or over-attachment. It grew out of love, fear, and the cultural weight placed on mothers to hold everything together. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: stay alert to keep someone alive.

2. Cultural conditioning tells mothers to carry the emotional load

Have you ever noticed how women are culturally trained to carry the cognitive and emotional responsibility for family well-being, to notice, anticipate, soothe, and prevent rupture?

Sociologist Sharon Hays describes this cultural expectation as intensive mothering: a model in which mothers are positioned as the primary guardians of children’s outcomes, expected to devote “enormous amounts of time, energy, and emotional resources” to their children, often at the expense of their own needs.

As Hays writes,

“The child’s needs are so substantial that the mother should devote virtually all her time, energy, and resources to caring for her child.”

How this often plays out in our lives is when something goes wrong in the family system, many mothers don’t look outward to complexity, systems, or circumstance; they turn inward.
This must be my fault.

When I was in the thick of things, I remember feeling that diverting energy toward myself was selfish, risky, and even morally wrong despite how exhausted I was.

How could I relax when my child’s life felt like it was in danger?

Alongside that fear lived a quieter, more painful belief: that I didn’t deserve care, love, or moments of joy because I had failed so profoundly at being a mother.

If you recognise yourself here, please know this: this isn’t personal weakness or individual failure. It’s cultural programming, a story we have told mothers for generations, one that teaches us to equate goodness with self-erasure and responsibility with suffering.

And when that story goes unchallenged, it doesn’t just exhaust mothers, it convinces them they are undeserving of care at the very moment they need it most.

3. Burnout care drains executive functioning

For many mothers, executive functioning is already stretched thin, shaped by our own neurodivergence and often compounded by hormonal changes like perimenopause. When a child is in burnout, that remaining capacity is quietly redirected toward keeping everyone safe, regulated, and afloat.

Supporting a child in burnout is emotionally, psychologically, and physically consuming. The constant vigilance, advocacy, emotional holding, and uncertainty draw heavily on our cognitive and executive functioning resources.

You may not even be aware of this, but your entire nervous system is constantly:

• Tracking mood shifts.
• Scanning for signs of risk.
• Anticipating the needs of your child before they’re spoken.
• Holding big emotions, theirs and your own, while trying to keep the family functioning.

This is not just “being attentive.”
It is survival-level coordination.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes emotional labour as the work of managing feelings, our own and others’, to maintain relationships and social systems. In families, this labour often falls disproportionately on mothers.

Many mothers carry:

• The emotional temperature of the household
• The responsibility for relational repair
• Vigilance around everyone else’s needs
• The anticipatory mental load of “What might go wrong next?”

This labour is continuous.
It is largely invisible.
And it is rarely acknowledged, let alone reciprocated.

When a child is in burnout, this emotional labour doesn’t just increase; it becomes totalising.

There is often very little left over, not because you are failing to prioritise yourself, but because your capacity is already being spent where the stakes feel highest.

Why “Just Take Time for Yourself” Doesn’t Work

Our culture loves to talk about self-care.
There’s a multi-million-dollar industry built around it.

But most self-care messaging assumes:

• Safety
• Choice
• Privilege
• Spare capacity
• A nervous system that trusts rest

For many mothers supporting neurodivergent children in burnout, those conditions simply don’t exist yet.

This is why well-meaning self-care advice can land as shame rather than support.

For many mums, when someone tells you to “just take time for yourself,” it can feel like another reminder of what you can’t access, instead of an acknowledgment of how much you are already carrying and just more evidence to reaffirm how they’re failing again.

Why Low-Demand Parenting Must Include Parental Demand Reduction (or it Collapses)

When it comes to supporting the recovery of a child or teen in burnout, lowering demands for your child becomes a necessity. Low-demand parenting is often described as something we do for children, and in many situations, that’s exactly what’s needed.

But in burnout contexts, if demands are only reduced for the child, the family system can quietly become structurally unequal.

Here is a pattern that may feel familiar to many moms of children and teens in burnout.

• The child’s capacity drops
• The mother compensates
• Invisible demands multiply for her, anticipation, buffering, emotional translation, advocacy, vigilance.

So while it may look like less is being asked overall, more is actually being carried, but just by one nervous system.

For low-demand parenting to become a sustainable, long-term way of life, demand reduction must be systemic, not one-directional.

That means lowering demands not just for the child, but for the caregiver too, including:

• Internal demands, like “I should be coping better than this”
• Relational demands, such as being the sole emotional container for the family
• Moral demands, including the belief that good mothers endure quietly

We need to reframe parental rest as not a reward for coping well, but as a precondition for safe caregiving.

In other words:

• You cannot low-demand your child while high-demanding yourself indefinitely
• Burnout recovery requires capacity regeneration in the caregiver, not just accommodation of the child

When this piece is missing, mothers don’t just feel tired.
They begin to feel erased.

Gentle Ways to Re-orient Without Pushing Yourself

When our nervous systems are in a state of high alert, adding more (even if it seems helpful) to your already full plate just creates more overwhelm and sends messages to your body that you are unsafe.
It’s about helping your body feel just a little safer where it already is.

1. Name what your body is doing (this alone can help)

Taking time to just notice and gently orient your physical body in a space through your senses is a really gentle start.

You can also try gently saying to yourself:

“I’m not bad at resting. My nervous system is in protection mode.”

Naming this externalises the shame and invites compassion. You don’t need to change the state, just recognising it is enough.

2. Choose micro-moments that are interruptible

Instead of “self-care,” think of signals of selfhood.

Tiny moments that:

• can stop at any time
• don’t require recovery
• don’t need to “work”

This might look like:

• standing in sunlight for 30 seconds
• placing a hand on your chest and feeling one breath
• listening to one song
• stretching your shoulders once

These aren’t habits.
They’re reminders: I still exist.

3. Give yourself permission without the pressure to act

Before doing anything, you might practice saying:

“I’m allowed to want rest, even if I can’t access it yet.”

Desire doesn’t need to be acted on to be valid.
Often, permission is the first repair.

Identity Grief: The Unspoken Loss Beneath Maternal Self-Abandonment

Caring for a child in burnout doesn’t just take up your time and energy; it reshapes your identity.

It is so common for many mums to quietly experience a loss of a future self, professional identity, creative or intellectual life, spontaneity and alone time.

I remember times when I would stand in front of the mirror and struggle to recognise myself, and I grieved the version of me that I had lost.

However, because motherhood is culturally rewarded for being ‘selfless’, this grief is often minimised, pathologised or turned inward as shame.

Francis Weller writes that grief, which is unrecognised by culture, is among the most corrosive forms of grief.

What made it especially painful for me was that this loss was ongoing, not something I could process and place safely in the past. Our children are alive, so there is no ritual, no socially recognised permission to mourn.

In fact, many parents are subtly (and sometimes overtly) taught that if we name the grief we carry, it must mean we don’t love or accept our children.

And so the grief goes underground, unspoken, unfriended, and carried alone.

So, in a bid to protect ourselves, many of us narrow our identity to caregiving, because holding both responsibility and grief at the same time can feel unbearable.

It can feel as though the part of you who gave up so much to care for your child in burnout no longer exists. But she doesn’t disappear because she isn’t wanted.

She disappears because it feels unsafe to hold her alongside your child’s suffering.

This is also why burnout care can rob mothers not only of who they were, but of the ability to imagine who they might become.

Future-thinking requires safety, and when all energy is directed toward survival, possibility goes offline.

This is why reclaiming interests or desires can evoke:

• Guilt
• Anxiety
• Emptiness
• Or a strange sense of betrayal

It isn’t indulgence that’s being resisted.
It’s unintegrated grief, asking to be seen before anything new can grow.

You Are Not Broken, You Are Carrying Too Much

If you’re a mother supporting a neurodivergent child or teen in burnout and self-care feels unreachable, please hear this:

Nothing has gone wrong in you.

Your nervous system has adapted to extraordinary circumstances.
Your identity has narrowed to keep your child safe.
Your needs haven’t disappeared; they’ve been quieted for survival.

That deserves tenderness, not pressure.

HELD exists because mothers deserve spaces that don’t rush them, fix them, or ask them to perform healing.

It’s a place where: Nervous systems are honoured, self-erasure is gently named, grief, identity loss, and exhaustion are welcomed annd nothing is required to belong

If this reflection resonates, you’re warmly invited to learn more about HELD, a soft, low-pressure space for mothers navigating burnout care, reclaiming themselves at the speed safety allows.

You don’t need to be ready.
You don’t need to change.
You just need somewhere you don’t have to hold it all alone.

You can explore HELD here.

References

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. Norton.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.

Hays, S. (1996). The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Yale University Press.

Weller, F. (2013). The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Clear Creek.

The Person Who Wrote This Blog

Tanya Valentin is a neuro-affirming family coach, writer, and women’s circle facilitator supporting parents of neurodivergent children through burnout recovery.

Drawing on lived experience, nervous-system-informed practice, and relational facilitation, her work explores grief, identity, and the quiet return to self-trust.

She is the founder of From Burnout to Balance and HELD.

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