Neurodivergent Perinatal Care Plan

Click the image to download a pdf of the care plan

Bringing home a new baby is a huge adjustment for anyone. But if you're neurodivergent, the postpartum period can impact you in ways that aren't always talked about or understood.

It's not just that you're learning how to care for a newborn. Overnight, your routines disappear. Your sleep becomes fragmented. Your cognitive load increases dramatically. You're constantly switching tasks, responding to interruptions, making decisions, and managing an enormous amount of sensory input. Even things that are often described as "normal" parts of early parenthood (like noise, touch, unpredictability, visitors, feeding schedules, and being needed around the clock) can place significant demands on your nervous system.

Many of the challenges that come with postpartum life overlap with areas that ADHD and autistic individuals may already find difficult, including executive functioning, emotional regulation, transitions, sensory processing, cognitive overload, and burnout. Without understanding someone's neurotype, it's easy to assume they're simply anxious, struggling to adjust, or "not coping well."

We've also worked with many parents who first recognize their ADHD or autism during pregnancy or after having a baby. This can happen because the systems, routines, and coping strategies that supported you before parenthood may no longer be available. Once sleep deprivation, constant interruptions, increased responsibilities, and near-constant sensory input become part of daily life, it can become much harder to compensate in the ways you always have.

That doesn't mean every neurodivergent parent will experience a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder. And it doesn't mean every PMAD is actually undiagnosed ADHD or autism. What it does mean is that effective perinatal mental health care should always consider how your brain and nervous system work.

We encourage every neurodivergent parent to think intentionally about pregnancy, birth, and postpartum planning. Rather than trying to fit yourself into someone else's idea of what the postpartum experience "should" look like, we want to help you create one that actually supports you.

Work through the questions on the first several pages of the care plan, thinking about what YOU need throughout your experience. Page 7 pulls some of the information into a one page document for you to complete and share with your support people or care team. Feel free to duplicate this page as you need to, or add additional information as you need to. Make it your own - the point is for it to be yours and what you need.

As you work through this care plan, we invite you to keep coming back to one question:

If we were designing a postpartum experience that worked with your brain and nervous system instead of against it, what would need to be different?