Welcome to the Attention Deficit Disorder Expert Podcast Series by Attitude magazine.

Good afternoon everyone. It's Susan Clopin here at Attitude. We are very

happy today to have Dr. Fred Frankel who's been working in the field of

children's friendships for almost 30 years.

In fact, he's worked with over 2,500 families.

He is the author of several books that we strongly recommend.

One's Friends Forever,

How Parents Can Help Their Kids Make and Keep Good Friends. recommend one's friends forever, how parents can help their kids make and keep good

friends, and he's the director of the UCLA Parenting and Children's Friendship Program.

Dr. Frankel today is going to focus primarily on children 6 to 12 and on active techniques

that parents can do to help their children make friendships.

So with that

we'll turn it over to Dr. Frankel who will give an introduction and then we will take questions as always.

Well, thank you, Susan, for the introduction and thank you for inviting me on this.

Today I'm going to be talking about friendships with ADHD children who are primarily

in elementary school, although I've done some work on kids with ADHD and other disorders. We've been running our clinic which teaches kids how to make

and teen friends since 1991 and in terms of the kinds of kids we see about two-thirds of them have

attention deficit disorder a small proportion of them have what's known as an autism spectrum disorder and still others

have no particular disorder but they're having trouble making and keeping friends.

And they have all of the different kids have similar problems with

friendship it doesn't matter what they have and what I'll do is go over a typical scenario, in this case a mom has

written a letter to me, which you see up here. I'll go over that. It's very typical of what parents experience. Then I'll talk about the importance

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