Does anyone know of a pen-friend matching scheme for children with disabilities?

[moosemama]

Just had a thought whilst wittering on on a SNs thread.

I wondered if anyone knows of a pen-friend type befriending scheme for children with ASD/ADHD and or any other disability for that matter.

I was thinking about the fact that a lot of our dcs are socially isolated, but have shared interests and would probably really enjoy the opportunity to build a friendship with someone in a less challenging way than face to face, iyswim.

I think ds1 would love to have a pen-friend he could write (well type) to about Nintento consoles, video games, Star Wars (Clone Wars) and Pokemon and I'm sure the same must be true of other boys (and girls) like him.

Has anyone ever heard of anything like this?

As a quick afterthought, I suppose actually it wouldn't have to be a scheme just designed for children with disabilities, as this would be one of those times when their disabilities genuinely wouldn't matter a jot.

They could enjoy being friends and sharing news and knowledge etc without their disability coming into it.

My dd1 write to another girl who has HFA like her. However, we know her in RL and we see her over the school holidays as they live a little too far for after school visits.
I would be concerned that someone might take advantage if it was someone we didnt know as i dont read her post.

I wondered about that Lisa, that's why I wondered if there were any vetted schemes around - although ds1 would probably want me to be actively involved in his letter writing anyway.

I would probably encourage him to use it as a sort of project, perhaps keeping a scrapbook of the letters or something, so that it was all done in a very open way rather than being something he did on his own.

Just musing over the idea really though, I have no idea whether or not it would/could work irl.

I think I posted about one on her before but it could have been any number of years ago! If you go to Advanced Search you might find it. I'll see if I can track down the info.

OMG I found it! Bearing in mind that this info is OLD:

Write Away a specific Special Needs organisation for Pen-friends. Siblings can also join for a one off membership fee of £2 per person. www.write-away.org

Moose. Your DS1 could write to my Aspie DS1. Same interests. Even better if he is into history. My DS1 (12) could do with the social interaction and the handwriting practice!!

Thanks Davros. If you click on the link you end up at a Chinese (I think site), but a quick google says its defnitely the write web-address.

I did find their contact details on a few sites though here.

Verity and Sally, that's a really nice thought, but I'm not sure how we could effectively vet each other, iyswim. I'm sorry, that sounds terrible, but I hope you know what I mean.

I was hoping that somewhere like perhaps the NAS would be doing something. Perhaps it's too hard to organise and sure the safety of members etc, so they won't risk it?

It's such a shame that this world is now one where we have to be so over-cautious about these things to ensure our childrens' safety. I think our dcs would benefit a lot from something like this, but it seems it would be really hard to set up effectively.