Why Girls with ADHD Find Friendships So Hard (A Masterclass, Delivered Live, On My Sofa)
I have thirty years of experience working with children with ADHD. I have read the research. I have delivered the training. I have sat in hundreds of meetings and said, with some authority, here is what is happening in her brain.
None of that prepared me for last Tuesday.
Last Tuesday I found myself wedged on my sofa between two eleven-year-olds.
On my left: diagnosed ADHD, currently vibrating at a frequency only bats can hear. On my right: not diagnosed, not assessed, absolutely-one-hundred-percent-has-ADHD, doing the thing where you go completely still and emit a low-level distress signal like a ship in fog.
Between them: me. Apparently with nothing better to do on a Tuesday lunchtime.
Something had happened at school, the normal things. The precise nature of Something was unclear because both were telling me simultaneously, neither was describing the same event, and one was also eating a biscuit.
I said: one at a time.
This did not work.
Here is what I know about putting two girls with ADHD in the same emotional crisis and asking them to take turns.
You might as well ask a bonfire to take turns.
The one on my left had a grievance that was seven months old and had finally reached critical mass when the one on my right had looked at her in a way. The one on my right had no memory of the look, but had her own grievance — a sleepover in Year 5, a blue blanket, a comment that was “actually quite mean, actually.”
I had a moment of thinking: the blue blanket was a year ago.
I did not say this out loud. I am a professional.
What I did instead was stop trying to establish facts and ask how she was feeling.
She looked at me like I’d asked her to explain the offside rule in Mandarin.
Then she said: I don’t know. Like a lot of things at once.
The one on my right said quietly: yeah. That.
VERY IMPORTANT - And here’s the thing — most girls with ADHD will tell you something like this, if you ask the right way. Not all. When you’ve met one girl with ADHD, you’ve met one girl with ADHD. But many of them carry this same experience: the inside is louder than the outside suggests.
For the one on my left, the corridor look hadn’t just registered as rude. It had landed as: she hates me, it’s over, I’ve lost her, I always ruin everything. Instant. Total. Not chosen.
For the one on my right, quieter on the surface, it was the same storm running differently — not flooding outward but compressing inward, replaying the blue blanket on a loop, building a case against herself for things that hadn’t been her fault.
Two different presentations. The same underneath.
We sat with that for a minute.
Then one started crying. Then the other. Then, I will be honest, I wasn’t entirely dry-eyed either. Unprofessional. There we are.
We had cuddles. More biscuits. We established that neither had meant to hurt the other, the corridor look had not been malicious, the blue blanket had been misread on both sides, and they both found groups of people exhausting and each other considerably less so.
That night a sleep over arranged and by eight o’clock they were doing each other’s nails and laughing about something I wasn’t party to.
Two days later, they were both back.
Different issue. Same sofa.
I was not surprised. What I was, genuinely, was glad — because the fact that they keep coming back means they feel safe enough to. Not conflict-free. Not perfectly navigated. Just safe enough to keep trying.
