Update: Our son's friend

Update: our son's friend

Thanks to everyone for the advice, it's been great to see the opinions people have put forward on how we are feeling about this situation. I firmly believe a mother's instinct is always right and we are gong to trust this. We don't believe we are the ones with the problem, we have alarm bells ringing about this child and cannot help these feelings. We have given this child many chances and these alarm bells keep ringing ?.

We have know this child for quite a few years and know his family well. His parents are lovely (we are well aware that people may be different behind closed doors) but from experience with this family, they appear to be fine, no alarms bells there ?.

For everyone that is worrying about this child, I have chatted to our son and he assures me that he has friends at his new school so he has been able to make new friendships ?. In primary school, our son appeared to be his only friend, they would get into trouble a lot, fighting amongst themselves and with our boys in their year. They would constantly have to be separated in the classroom due to their behaviour together. We've been told by many teachers including preschool teachers that our son is a follower, he is easily influenced by children like this which is something we have had to work on over the years. Lots of discussions about right and wrong behaviour. Whilst I won't blame this child for our son's behaviour, I feel sometimes it's better for our son to have others in his life that are more of a positive role model. Another child joined the classroom a few years back whom our son seemed to really like. He tried to get to know him but unfortunately this friendship didn't progress as our son's friend did his best to stop it. Wether it was out of jealousy or not, I'm not sure. He seemed to be quite possessive of our son, not allowing him out of his sight. The 3 of them couldn't all play happily together which was disappointing for the new boy to the school and for us too. He eventually went off and found another group of friends to hang out with.

When he is at our house we find him to be quite rude at times. We pull him up on his behaviour and explain that we don't talk that etc in our house. We find he picks on our youngest son whilst we are not watching, threatens to bash him. Sadly, he seems to be quite sly about it ???.

We are scared to think what will happen come the later teenage years, our son is so easily influenced ?. I suppose we just need to keep talking to him, keep those lines of communication open and allow him to feel comfortable with us to come to us if he has a problem.

For those of you that have thrown around the autism idea, I strongly disagree with this. From my experience, his behaviours are tending towards oppositional defiance disorder. Not formally diagnosed, but he exhibits many of these behaviours in my opinion and it scares us ?.

So where to now???

We are not going to say anything to our son or tell him who not to hang out with or who to hang out with. We will monitor this friendship and see where it goes allowing our son to make his own choices. We will be there for him and talk to him about any issues that may arise and offer our advice as required. It would be easy for us to say flat out to him, "don't have anything to do with this friend" but that's certainly not the right way to go about it, unless something drastic happens. Our son needs to learn and grow from all experiences in life (even if his parents our not happy lol).