Hi, I’m Tarryn. A paediatric OT raising an ADHD child.

CHAPTER ONE

From the OT clinic to a deep love for kids who think differently.

I qualified as an Occupational Therapist from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2004, and the moment I started working with children I knew this was the work I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

For over a decade I worked clinically with children - much of that time in the UK, where Tim and I lived for 13 years before moving back to South Africa. Helping kids cope with the daily demands of the classroom, the noise, the transitions, the overwhelm of expectations that didn’t always match how their brains actually worked. I trained further in Sensory Integration, which became the lens through which I understood so much of what these kids were really experiencing.

What I loved most was watching a child go from struggling to confident - not because the world had changed, but because we’d found a way to give them tools that fit how they were wired.

CHAPTER TWO

And then I became a mom.

The scariest and most fulfilling adventure of my life.

Tim - my husband - has ADHD too, which means I’d already had a front-row seat to what an ADHD brain looks like in adulthood long before our daughter was diagnosed. We’ve been figuring out family life together for over 20 years now, with our two children, Gracie and Josh, and the kind of slightly chaotic home that only families with neurodivergent brains really understand.

What I knew clinically met the reality of doing it at home, in the kitchen at 4pm with a tired child and a tired me. And the gap between “OT advice” and “real life parenting” suddenly felt enormous.

CHAPTER THREE

When Gracie was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD.

A few years ago, my daughter Gracie was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD.

Gracie is bright, creative, and wonderfully quirky. She’s the kid who notices the small things, who tells stories that go in beautiful tangents, who sees the world in her own particular way. And she was struggling - really struggling - with the small things that felt impossibly big. Getting ready for school. Sitting still long enough to finish homework. Keeping track of where her shoes were.

I went looking for resources for myself. Something that combined the clinical OT understanding I already had with the real-life messiness of doing this at home with my own child.

That’s how Nurture ADHD started - not as a business plan, but as a survival plan for one little girl named Gracie.

CHAPTER FOUR

And what Nurture ADHD has become.

Once Gracie and I started building routines and systems that actually worked for her brain, everything softened. Mornings stopped being a battle. Homework got easier. The household started running on rhythm instead of on my voice.

I started sharing what we were doing on Instagram - mostly because I knew other moms were in the same place I’d been. The community grew quickly. The questions kept coming. And one by one, I built the programs that I wished had existed for me.

Today, more than 5,000 families have been through these programs, and over 1.2 million parents follow along on Instagram and Facebook for the daily reminders, scripts, and “you’re not alone” moments.

But it all still comes back to one thing: the way we were parenting Gracie wasn’t broken. It just needed to be rebuilt for the brain she actually has.