My son is 13. He is well liked by his school peers and teachers, but he struggles to form strong friendships and even understand what a friend truly is.
He rarely does things outside of school or school activities with his friends. He doesn't seem to keep in regular contact with more than 2-3 of them. Rarely has an engaging or meaningful conversations with them, and doesn't seem to even understand when a friend is a friend and who he's actually really friends with. He's jovial and friendly with most of the boys at school, but it all kind of ends there. He'll send the odd text to some of his friends, but they're mainly just random memes or dumb words that make no sense. Never a proper back and forth conversation / chat type thing.
Does this sound even remotely normal for young boys?
DH blames me for our son's friendship situation and still sees it as my responsibility to arrange meet ups for my son and his friends to do something together by getting in touch with their mums. DH points out how other mums who are friends with eachother do a better job at arranging things between their children which makes me feel like a really shit mum. I'm friendly with a couple mums who also have boys. Sometimes I will suggest / plan things for our boys to do something, but more often than not I now see my friendship (limited) with them independent of our boys friendships. So if I end up going out for a drink with one of my friends our conversation generally revolves around stuff specific to our lives and not our children's lives. I don't come away from a night out with any of them with the goal of making plans for our boys to do something m. My DH is baffled by this.
I will also say that I am awful at maintaining friendships of my own and I see a lot of what I shared about my son in myself as well. I am diagnosed ADHD and most likely on the ASD spectrum in the form of Asperger's.
What I'm trying to understand is whether my son's behaviour and approach to friendships is normal for his age and in the current tech based era where it seems people struggle to converse at times. Or if it's my fault that I've not focused on spending time creating and strengthening friendships for him. Or if he is also likely on the spectrum like myself and struggles the same way I do.
I've always suspected the later, but DH won't even entertain the notion