4-min read
If you're trying to help your child with friendships, the honest starting point is this. Children and teens with ADHD often have fewer, shorter, and bumpier friendships than their peers, and being rejected by other kids is linked to problems later on. The evidence does not yet point to one proven fix.
What friendships often look like for a child with ADHD
A 2025 review by Neprily and colleagues pulled together studies of children and adolescents with ADHD and found a steady pattern: friendships that are fewer in number, lower in quality, and less stable than those of children without ADHD.
The figures the review gathers are striking. In one study it cites (Hoza and colleagues, 2005), 56% of children with ADHD had no mutual, one-on-one friendship, compared with 32% of children without ADHD. Another study it reports (Marton and colleagues, 2015) found that the friendships of children with ADHD lasted 9.6 to 14.4 months less than those of comparison children. And in a study by Heiman (2005), only 6% of children with ADHD had a friend over to their home, compared with 30% of other children.
The review links these difficulties to the symptoms of ADHD itself, to trouble with planning and self-control, to reading social situations, and to managing strong emotions. It also notes that up to 85% of children with ADHD have working memory difficulties, which makes holding the thread of a fast-moving playground conversation harder.
One caution matters here. Neprily and colleagues (2025) point out that most of the studies behind these numbers were small and mostly involved white, school-aged boys, so they may not describe every child. It is also a summary of earlier work rather than a fresh experiment. Still, the direction is consistent, and it tells you the struggle your child may be having is common, not unusual.
Why does peer rejection matter more than having one friend?
One large American study that followed children with ADHD for years, reported by Mrug and colleagues (2012), gives a sobering answer. Researchers looked at 300 children who had the combined form of ADHD, meaning both inattention and hyperactivity, who were 7 to almost 10 years old at the start, and they tracked them to about ages 15 and 17.
Children who were rejected by their peers were more likely, years later, to show delinquency, cigarette smoking, anxiety, and broader difficulty functioning in daily life. That link held even after the researchers accounted for other differences between the children.
Here is the part that surprises many parents. Having a mutual friend did not predict how these children turned out, and it did not soften the effects of being rejected by the wider group. In plain terms, one good friend, on its own, was not enough to shield a child from the harm tied to broad rejection. In one detail that runs against intuition, rejected teens who did have a friend were actually somewhat more likely to smoke than rejected teens without one. Friendship, in this study, was not a simple protective shield.
Two limits are worth holding onto. This study included only children with the combined form of ADHD, so it may not describe children whose ADHD is mainly inattentive. And it watched what happened over time rather than testing a way to change things. That means it can tell you what seems to matter, being accepted by the group, without telling you what to do to make that happen. It is a signpost, not an instruction.
How can I help my child with friendships when the answers are still forming?
It helps to be clear about what the research does and does not offer. The studies above describe the friendship gap and show that peer rejection is linked to later trouble. What they do not do is test a specific thing you can do at home and prove it works. That gap is worth naming plainly, but it is not a dead end. An unanswered question is not the same as a settled "nothing helps."
What the findings do suggest is where to point your attention. Because rejection by the wider peer group was so strongly tied to later outcomes in Mrug and colleagues (2012), and because a single friendship did not cancel that out, it may be worth watching how your child is treated by groups of children, not only whether they have one close buddy.
You can also build around what your child does well and the settings where they clearly thrive. The environment strengths section goes deeper on doing exactly that.
And be gentle with both of you. The difficulties in these studies are common, and Neprily and colleagues (2025) tie them to how ADHD affects planning, emotion, and reading social cues, not to bad parenting or a bad kid.
Try this today: For one week, keep a simple note of your child's social contact each day, writing down who they saw, whether it was one-on-one or in a group, and how it seemed to go, so you build a clearer picture of where friendships come easily and where they strain.
Sources
- Mrug S, Molina B, Hoza B, et al.. Peer Rejection and Friendships in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Contributions to Long-Term Outcomes. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (2012). doi:10.1007/s10802-012-9610-2
- Kirsten Neprily, Emma A. Climie, Adam W. McCrimmon, et al.. Why can't we be friends? A narrative review of the challenges of making and keeping friends for children and adolescents with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology (2025). doi:10.3389/fdpys.2024.1390791
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