The ADHD Dopamine Collective with Rhonda Estling

Everyone says sports are good for kids with ADHD. So why does drop-off some nights feel like sending your kid into a pressure cooker? This episode sits in the gap between what the research promises and what neurodivergent families actually live: the dugout that turns into an executive-function minefield, the “just run it off” advice that backfires on a sensory seeker, and the meltdown after a bad...

Youth sports can feel like one of the hardest things to navigate as a neurodivergent parent — especially when you're raising neurodivergent kids too. In this episode, I sit down with my go-to friend and resource, Chandran Lepel. She's a licensed therapist, former collegiate athlete, high school varsity coach, and mom of kids in the youth sports world — which gives her a lens almost no one else has...

AI is not going to fix your ADHD, and the way most people are telling us to use it might actually make executive dysfunction worse. In this episode, Rhonda is walking through a third path between the AI is amazing and AI is ruining us camps — one rooted in how ADHD brains actually work. You'll hear about scaffolding vs. substituting (a concept from education that changes how you engage with the to...

What if your kid's meltdown had nothing to do with behavior — and everything to do with an unmet need? In this episode, Rhonda sits down with Brett Welch, licensed therapist and parent coach at Sensitivity Is Strength Coaching, to talk about what it actually looks like to parent highly sensitive, neurodivergent, and PDA-profile kids in a world that wasn't built for them. Brett brings 20+ years of...

You're not doing it wrong. You've just been working on the wrong piece of the system. I had a conversation in my therapy office recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. A woman — smart, capable, doing the work — looked at me and said, "I feel like I'm doing something wrong." She'd read the books. Tried the hacks. Bought the planners. Was on TikTok and in the Facebook groups. And s...

In this episode, Rhonda sits down with Imani Harrison, LCPC — therapist, facilitator, and what she calls an "idea midwife" — for one of the most honest, winding, neurodivergent conversations we've had yet. Imani shares her journey from late ADHD diagnosis to full-on life overhaul: ending a marriage, dissolving a business partnership, letting go of a name she loved, and somehow landing in the most...

In this solo episode, Rhonda shares something she's spent over a decade refining: the clinical patterns she watches for in her therapy office that suggest a client may have more going on than anxiety or depression. Not diagnostic criteria. Not a checklist. Just the things that make her start asking different questions. She covers chronic overwhelm, sensory concerns, the burnout cycle, emotional dy...

In the middle of the night in December 2018, a desperate mom of a toddler and a newborn took to Facebook looking for answers. That one post got 72 comments and changed the course of her family's life. In this first episode of The ADHD Collective, therapist and late-diagnosed ADHDer Rhonda Estling shares the story behind the podcast, why she's building a community for women who get it, and what she...