Why are kids so mean?

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My 12 year old's "friends" strangely didn't want to go trick or treating this year. OK he agrees to go with his dad. While walking he sees all 3 of them who "couldn't go".

Must my son get emotionally kicked in the gut every single day. How can people be so cruel. I would NEVER let my 2 NT girls act that way.

He still hasn't been told he has an ASD though he sees a psychiatrist for many years. Maybe I should just tell him. At least he could seek solace in the Community. But I don't want him to see himself as "disabled". He has a social disability but shouldnt i focus on his strengths? BTW his traits are superfically mild but very disabling as all his friends eventually leave him. His dads an introvert and he's fine and maybe it won't help to give him a label.

Heartache sucks.....happy Halloween

in terms of kindness, it seems more often than not, that 90% of kids give the other 10% a bad reputation. if your son is anything like me when I was a kid, he will find solace in kind and ethical adults. it would be a good idea if you and dad sat down with him and explained man's inhumanity to man, to him in a way he can understand but that won't discourage him too much.

This is about one of the saddest stories I've ever heard. I may be autistic but I can definitely feel your kid's pain. And the thing is, they won't give a toss how your kid feels. And they wonder why some of us embrace the dark side.

Could have been worse-- at least they didn't follow him, harass him, call him names.

They just lied about not wanting to go, because they didn't want to be seen with "THAT KID."

Brace yourself, Mom-- welcome to middle school. It's going to get worse.

Give your guy a hug. Tell him middle school sucks for everyone. Yeah-- you might want to think about disclosure. By this age, he already thinks of himself as SOMETHING (and probably not something good). He might as well have a reason.

Give him a hug. Some extra hobby-time. Tell him middle school sucks for everyone, and perhaps it's time to find some friends whose little heads haven't outstripped their cerebral cortexes.

Tell him to hang in there-- it gets worse, but then it gets better. Jennifer Myers has a great phrase: "Dear, you aren't all that great at being a kid. But childhood only lasts for a little while, and you're going to be MUCH BETTER at being an adult." It's true. It's going to get worse, but then it will get better.

I don't think it's mean to not want to go trick or treating with someone. I don't know what their reason was. People are too polite to even be honest because they don't want to hurt their feelings. Those kids didn't want to hurt your son's feelings and they did anyway when he saw them trick or treating. But I can also feel his pain and feel sad for him. Sometimes I do wish people would just be honest like "I don't want to go trick or treating with you." But people still call that mean so they can't win.

That's a great quote BuyerBeware. I disagree that all kids will know something is up by that age though. My oldest is 13 and knows his diagnosis, but still doesn't get that there is anything different about him. He has very, very low insight and was pretty sheltered while homeschooled, though. If that happened to him he'd probably say they changed their minds and try to go join them, then get aggravated at me for not letting him.

Kids in general suck at that age. Sometimes my 12 year old does stuff that shocks me. At the family reunion he was mocking an 8 year old with apraxia of speech, and the other day he was mocking a girl cousin who saw us in the store who has severe buck teeth. Both times he was in trouble and grounded for a day (neither girl saw it). He'll probably do it again. He knows better. He's been bullied at school by some kid that was constantly calling him gay (as a slur) and other orientation based slurs, so he knows it sucks yet he still does it to other kids. Something about being 12 makes the average kid just be a jerk sometimes. The only good thing about it is that most of them grow up a bit sometime in Junior High.

It's because he's not like them. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's normal for kids. I only have one data point, though: my own.

Same pattern as your boy. I don't know how severe he is, but I'm beginning to suspect I may have won the figurative lottery when it comes to being on the spectrum. So keep that in mind if you read on.

It is not a 90/10 split in kids, 90% good, 10% bad. Bullying is built into every member of our species, it's in every observed primate, as well as numerous other species. It appears to be an ancient mechanism and our educators--and wiki authors!--are screwing the pooch (forgive!) by pretending and teaching that it's a choice instead of an instinct to be controlled. Bullying appears to be no more of a choice than breathing.

I mention this because I couldn't have controlled my friends' actions anymore than you can control those of your kids' friends. If it is anything like my experience, this is a pattern that will be repeated over and over again until he either grows into the understanding of what it takes to make it, or gives up.


If you're normal, I'm sure you already understand your son doesn't need what you need or needed at his age. Personally, I don't need friends. I need one I can trust. I hardly ever call him. I don't need to interact socially 5 times a week, or even once a week. I'd rather hole-up and do my projects & experiments. At an early age, if I wasn't with the guys I grew up with, I was literally hanging out with older people. They knew cooler stuff, and didn't tease me, beat me up, or ditch me.

Would it have been easier if I'd been social earlier? It'd have been easier to find a mate, but no more likely (less likely, even!) to find one that would stick around. I guess there's an elevated divorce rate. For me social events are things to be wormed out of, not something to look forward to. Whether I knew what to do or not, I hated them. So there's that aspect from my experience.

As to telling him or not, I have some insight there, too.

I just found out 3 weeks ago, and I'm aged 46 years. I'm married with a nice place, a good career, a few cats, and no kids (I didn't know what was wrong with me, but I knew there was something about me that I didn't want to take the chance and pass on to anyone!)

It's been an incredibly difficult path, but I've built a fully-functional personae that I can don when I need to go out. I can't quite keep it up for 8 hours straight, but the job I created fits my abilities and capacities perfectly, it's rewarding, I feel fulfilled, and is great fun! And I built it in a way that accommodates my other needs, though I didn't realize those needs were related to my condition (I honestly thought I was being a lazy bum, and hoped nobody would figure it out!)

I was just speaking with my wife (happily, of 11.5 years) earlier tonight at dinner, wondering if it was a good thing, or a bad thing, that nobody told me.


As of this moment, I'm inclined to think it was good that nobody told me. I'm also a bit annoyed. Essentially I didn't know I was at a disadvantage, I thought it was this hard for everyone. On the downside of that call, though, depending on your politics I turned out to be a Libertarian.
EDIT1: removed an opinion that was all of 2 hours old. I've since thought through more thoroughly. I do not agree with what I stated earlier. (now to hope nobody quoted it!) /EDIT1

Another part of the conversation with my wife was chicken-and-egg; did I succeed despite the challenges because I had this fire in me already, or do I have a fiercely can-do attitude because of needing to figure my way around so many obstacles? I really don't know the answer to that. Yet. I hope to figure that out one day. I have bigger things to fry.

But as of right now, given that my parents were significantly older and died of natural causes when I was relatively young (semi-functional adult, early 20s), I'm glad nobody told me. I didn't have any excuses. I thought it was like this for everyone. Obviously I can observe that they're doing things differently that I. Patterns are my thing. I can see deviations from average behaviors, and everything else must be "normal."

In full disclosure, though, I did have two defining sink-or-swim moments. One involved attempted suicide (unknown to anyone, 16 years old), and then again serious thoughts of suicide in my first year of college when nothing had changed.

I am a fifteen year old (suspected) aspie girl, and this exact thing has happened to me many times, though more often than just Halloween. I think it may be time to tell him, not because he has a disability, but so he can focus on the "symptoms" of his disability and maybe learn to pick up on the times when he is not entirely understanding the situation.

I turned twelve in the seventh grade. By then, I had been researching autism, asperger's, and what makes me different for years. I had figured out which situations left me the most likely to misinterpret people, be manipulated, or just plain be bothering people but not know it. I was better able to watch out for these times BECAUSE I knew about AS and what I should be looking out for. He may just not know what he is doing "wrong", or what he is doing that the other children are perceiving as wrong, and needs to be told about his syndrome if only to give him the peace of mind that there are others like him out there somewhere.

I hope he does find some good friends, by the way. I have found a few that have stuck by me for years, but others come and go as soon as I start to act the slightest bit different. Maybe he could join WP if you told him, there are plenty of kids his age that would love to PM about the difficulties that only they can understand, and many older than him willing to offer advice.

Yes, sharkbait, I would be inclined to agree. Bullying and exclusion of the "different" members is an inborn mammalian characteristic. Maybe an inborn characteristic of all life.

I think the antibullying programs are doing kids-- in general, including the different kids-- a disservice. Zero Tolerance for Bullying is just going to become another tool that the "in-crowd" uses to harass-- "FreakBoy hurt my feelings!! He's bullying me!!"

And it will work, too. Because it's also inborn to tolerate bullying of the "different" members. Tell the truth-- for those among you who are NT parents of ASD kids (especially high-functioning ones), do you not sometimes feel scorn and revulsion when you look at your ASD child?? It's not something you control or choose-- it's an unconscious thought that skates across your mind, a curling of your lip...

...and then you suppress it, because that is your child and you love them. Because you are smart and strong, you have humanity, you are not going to let The Monkey win. But The Monkey is still in there, nevertheless.

In middle school, unfortunately, The Monkey is in the driver's seat.

It's entirely possible the parents of those 3 "friends" have no idea, as you wouldn't either if it were your two girls who decided to do that. How would the parents know? All it takes is a small lie, or omission of the truth. "Oh, so n so couldn't make it" That's all it takes. If it were my neighborhood I'd be far more suspicious that it was the parents telling the kids to leave so n so out, as that is what happens to my daughter. The parents don't understand, they just think shes a weird kid with a weird parent and THEY are the ones who don't want her around while the kids at her age really don't see or much care about the differences yet.

Thing is you can't force kids to be friends. Can't do it. And if they are going to act like that, they aren't the right friends for your son anyway.

When parents say they will never let their kids do this or that, what they really mean is "I will never let my kids do this if I know about it before they do it." But yeah kids will always do things nonetheless out of your control like a kid throwing a tantrum in the store. How many of us have thought our kids will never do that before we became parents?

12 years old seems to be about the WORST age for boys. 7th grade was the year my son basically had NO friends. It's like boys suddenly wake up to the concept of social tiers and now care about where they sit in those tiers, when they didn't really before. First realization is the most insecure phase, and when kids will act the most immaturely (read, mean) in trying to secure their place.

One of the interesting things was that my son did not and never will care about where he sits the tiers. He just wants to be around people who like what he likes. That is all there is to it. Really beautiful. At some point, the people around him will mature to a similar place.

So here is the thing: this, too, shall pass. Once the boys feel more secure about where they sit socially, they will go back to prioritizing being with who they actually like. It will take a few years, but it gets there. My son has a solid social life he is quite content with now, but it was definitely rocky in middle school, and my heart broke for him on more than one occasion.

One thing I found helped my son get through it all was feeling he had choices. I told him we could home school if he wanted (he chose not to), and there were kids who were content to let him sit with them at lunch - quite popular kids, actually - just that my son didn't share their interests or enjoy their conversations and didn't want to sit with them; he wanted his insecure more nerdy friends. Thank goodness all that is over. And being a pretty happy person naturally, he made it through without huge deep scars.

Ages and stages for girls are totally different, I have one of each, so this applies only to boys.

DW_a_mom is definitely one of the wisest and most experienced parents on this board. LISTEN TO HER.

Lest you think my earlier comment is a slur against spectrum kids-- looking back, I can easily see how it looks that way-- it isn't. It's an uncomfortable statement of what is to me an apparent fact; if it's a slur against anything, it's a slur against The Monkey.

The primitive part of us that has the programmed drive to propagate our own genotype (phenotype?? biology was a long time ago.) at the expense of all others. It's not just the reaction of an NT parent looking at an ASD child. It goes the other way, too-- I believe an ASD parent feels it, usually only occasionally and in passing, and might not even be aware of it, looking at their own NT child. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I've had it with DD12 and DD4-- but not with Young Mister Edison or DD1.

I wonder if that means I should be working on finding someone who can assess very mild ASD in a toddler????

That's really horrible of them, though at least he will be able to see for himself that they aren't true friends and hopefully he'll learn from it without becoming too emotionally isolated. I really think you should tell him about his ASD, he must surely be curious as to why he's seen the psychiatrist for so many years without anyone telling him why?

Louis