Scenario 1:

On Monday, Rose played at the local school playground. (It’s spring break.) She came running over to me quite shook up. She had been walking across the woodchips and an older girl had yelled at her for messing things up.

I offered to help mediate between her and the girl. It quickly became clear to me when the girl refused to acknowledge my presence, kept scraping her foot in the woodchips with fierce concentration, and barked at anyone else who dared to tread in her space that the normal ways of interacting were not going to work.

I told Rose, within the hearing of the girl and the other kids who wandered over, that this girl was concentrating very hard and some people get very upset when their work gets interrupted. When another child piped up that this girl was mean, I said, no, just concentrating. I reminded Rose of a child in her class who gets upset this way. I also told her that she had done nothing wrong and the woodchips belonged to everyone.

I’m assuming the girl was autistic and could not act differently. Part of me wants to accept that we all come with differences and we need to make allowances for each others’ differences. Part of me is pissed.

This girl was mean, viciously angry yelling people out of what was, common space. I’m comfortable making the allowance that she can own the space for a period of time and it would be rude and even cruel for the other kids to intentionally disrupt her work. But I can’t accept that she has to be so nasty. I’m still mad about that.

Scenario 2

We went back to the playground the next day. This time a girl attached herself to Rose. At first, I was pleased that Rose had randomly made a new friend, but then I looked a little more closely at her face and realized she was not happy.

It turns out the girl had glommed on to Rose, and she didn’t know how to extricate herself without hurting the girl’s feelings. I did it for her, trying to give her some stock phrases to use.

And then it happened again. I came over to Rose frozen on top of the climbing equipment.

Debby: How’s it going?
Rose, almost crying: She told me to stay here, and I don’t want to.
Debby: Honey, she’s not the boss of you. The only people who can tell you what to do are me or another grown-up in charge. You don’t have to do what she says.

Again it was clear that the normal ways of interacting were not going to work with this child either. She had no boundaries, did not take hints or even direct “I do not want to play with you now” commands, and she seemed to have an infinite need for attention. She was constantly giving me sticks as presents and demanding I watch her perform a trick on the bars—like a three year old demanding her mother’s attention, except she was nine and I was not her mother.

Still, there was no meanness in this child, no sense of threat if you said no. I put the problem this time on Rose. She has got to learn how to stand up for herself and not let kids boss her around. We knew she had a problem with this when she hooked up with the bully at school last year, and we thought the problem was over when she extricated herself from the bully’s clutches. She finally learned she was allowed to go play somewhere else.

But obviously, it ain’t over. This lesson, the “you don’t have to do what another kid tells you” lesson is complicated by the fact that you do sometimes need to do what someone else wants to do. We’ve been having problems in playdates where Rose says no to everything her visiting friend suggests. That’s not ok either.

Stay tuned for tonight’s bedtime story where the otter and the fairy explore these themes.