I mentioned last week that I’m reading a new book by Anne Ford, called “On Their Own.” Chapter six, in the book, deals with the friends and relationships of your Learning Disabled Child. Reading this book is making me feel rather naïve about learning disabilities. I keep coming across scenarios, that I have lived through either with our foster children or our adopted children, which I didn’t realize were signs of being learning disabled.

Our teenage daughter C came to live with us when she was 15 years old. We helped her to complete high school and find employment before she returned home to her mother a few weeks before her 18th birthday.

C constantly struggled with personal relationships. If a person showed the slightest interest in her, she would call them numerous times a day. In teenager lingo, this is called blowing up their phone. She couldn’t seem to control herself.

Time after time, I warned her that she was going to lose the friendship because she was smothering her new friend. Time after time, I watched it happen and I couldn’t convince her to stop. It didn’t matter if it was a new girl friend or a boy that she was interested in, she treated them the same way. Frequently, she was spending the night with a girl she had met only days before, her new “best friend.”

According to Anne Ford’s new book, On Their Own, this is a very common trait among people with LD. She says in her book, “…difficulty in making and keeping friends causes the most mental anguish.” “For many with LD or ADHD, the hard-wired aspects of social interaction have become tangled and short-circuited, and seemingly minor problems in the way they interact with others add up over time to an inability to connect in any meaningful way with anyone.”

Speaking on the presumption of friendship she says, “Just when the student managed to befriend someone…he or she went all out, full-steam ahead, smothering the person with attention and putting out the candle (of friendship) before it ever had a chance to shed its light.” This is exactly what our daughter C did. While I was cognizant that she had emotional problems, I never really thought of it as a learning disability.

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Photo is a scan of Anne Ford’s newest book, “On Their Own,” “Creating an Independent Future for Your Adult Child with Learning Disabilities and ADHD,” A Family Guide.