Why Girls with ADHD Find Friendships So Hard: Part 2 — What Actually Helps
Part 1 ended with two eleven-year-olds doing each other's nails and me quietly having feelings about it.
Part 2 is the practical bit. The what do you actually do bit.
I will warn you now: some of it is not what you expect. Some of it is going to sound suspiciously like doing less. And if you are the kind of parent who has already googled social skills groups, downloaded a feelings chart, and bookmarked seventeen articles about friendship difficulties in girls with ADHD - and never then read them! — firstly, hello, I see you — you may find this mildly annoying.
That's fine. Being mildly annoyed means you're paying attention.
The Thing We Try First (That Doesn't Work)
When our daughters come home distressed about a friendship, most of us do a version of the same thing.
We fix it.
Or rather, we attempt to fix it, at speed, using logic, while she is still crying.
We say things like: well, did you tell her how you felt? And: maybe she didn't mean it like that. And the absolute classic: have you tried just talking to her?
She has not tried just talking to her. She is eleven and her nervous system is currently running a four-alarm emergency response to a corridor look. Talking is not available right now.
What is available is: crying, catastrophising, eating your biscuits- two at a time if they fit, and a detailed retrospective analysis of every social interaction since Year 3.
The logic will not land. Not yet. Her brain is not in logic mode.
Her brain is in I am going to die alone and everyone secretly hates me and also the blue blanket thing mode.
And here is the part where I tell you something that sounds obvious but apparently needs saying out loud:
You cannot reason someone out of a feeling they haven't finished having yet.
Put that on a fridge magnet. Put it on the wall calendar you haven't updated since October. Tattoo it somewhere tasteful.
What She Actually Needs First
Brace yourself.
She needs you to sit down, say very little, and tolerate the chaos without trying to resolve it.
I know.
I know.
You have things to do. Tea to make. Emails to answer. A fruit bowl to investigate. And she is talking at approximately four hundred words a minute, the timeline makes no sense, and you have just realised this whole thing started because someone looked at her.
Sit down anyway.
Not to fix it. Just to receive it.
The girls on my sofa did not need me to establish a factual account of events — and believe me, I tried, I am professionally trained to establish facts, I still couldn't do it. What they needed was someone to absorb the chaos without flinching, without checking their phone, and without saying well, who started it.
Nobody started it.
Or rather, everybody started it, in about 2023, and we'll never get to the bottom of it, and that's fine.
What matters is that she felt heard. Which brings me to the bit that's actually going to help.
Two Things That Will Actually Help
Just two. We've talked about this. Long lists go in the Intentions I Had Once file.
1. Ask Better Questions
How are you feeling is a trap. As established on my sofa last Tuesday, the answer is I don't know, like a lot of things at once — which is accurate, but not a great starting point.
Try these instead:
"What's the bit that's hurting most?" — narrows it down. Gives her something specific to grab onto instead of drowning in the whole thing at once.
"Is this a right now problem or a bigger worry?" — because sometimes the corridor look is just a corridor look, and sometimes it's sitting on top of six months of accumulated social anxiety that has absolutely nothing to do with today. You need to know which one you're dealing with.
"What would make this feel even five percent better?" — not fixed. Not solved. Five percent better. This question is useful because it's small enough that her brain can actually answer it, and the answer is usually either a biscuit or just talk to her — and both are actionable.
You are not her therapist. You are not supposed to process the whole thing. You are just supposed to help her find the floor.
2. Stop Trying To Make Her Better At Friendship
I say this with love and thirty plus years of professional experience - a lived experience my own and my son eventually on the pathway. Praise RTC.
The impulse to enrol her in a social skills group, print out the feelings chart, and engineer friendship opportunities is completely understandable. You love her. You can see exactly what's happening. You want to hand her the manual.
There isn't a manual. Or rather, the manual exists but her brain doesn't read manuals. Her brain learns by doing, by getting it wrong, by coming home and eating your biscuits and going back the next day.
What she needs is not more skills.
What she needs is one safe person who gets her — including the intensity, the misread signals, the blue blanket retrospectives, the whole lot — and thinks she's worth the effort anyway.
If she has that, she has enough.
Everything else is learnable. Slowly. Messily. With many sofa-based debriefs along the way.
You're already providing those, by the way.
The fact that she comes home and tells you — even at volume, even incoherently, even while eating all your biscuits — means she trusts you with the hard stuff.
That is not nothing.
That is, genuinely, quite a lot.
