The Importance of Making and Keeping Friends for Children with ADHD

Children with ADHD typically have difficulty making and keeping friends due to their socially inappropriate behavior as we have discussed before. It is so important that both parents and teachers encourage these children to make friends but more importantly, give them the tools to do so. To many people, making friends is a natural occurrence, but to children with ADHD, especially those who are characterized by any type of anxiety, making friends can very difficult.

I have had children tell me that they have friends in school, so therefore, it does not matter if they do not have friends at home. It is vital to generalize the issue of making friends from school to home. In consideration of the new technology of text messaging and emailing, it is so much easier for these children to ask someone to hang out than it used to be. Previously, a child had to get up the courage to call another child and deal with the anxiety of talking to him. Now, talking to the child as such is out of the equation.

Teach your children how to text message and make sure that they have their own email account. Also, and this is so important, make sure that they learn what I call “email courtesy,” and respond to the text messages or the emails they receive. In order to respect their privacy, just ask them if they have received any messages and whether or not they responded to them.

Tomorrow, we will talk about the issue of how they can approach their peers in a way to make friends.