Age 10 is totally different though, right?

I hope so. Because there is a boy in Simon’s tennis group this time out who is working my last nerve. I first met Jon* at Simon’s 10 and under tennis tournament last June, where he immediately announced that he had won a tournament before. I didn’t love that, but I might have the child who bragged similarly, so I didn’t think too much about it.

Then he showed up for a week or two in one of Simon’s tennis clinics last fall, where he was a pretty bad sport. As I’ve explained before, Goldsteins are traditionally gracious winners and bad losers. Whitworths, on the other hand, are traditionally awful winners and equally bad losers in a way that counter-intuitively makes them pretty gracious at both. Which is to say, they gloat in victory, despair in loss, and clearly aren’t serious about either. It’s just part of the game.

Simon threads the middle. In public among his peers, he’s wonderful; alone with me and Matt, he can melt down with the worst of them. That tells me that he has a serious competitive fire in his belly, but cares enough about being polite and well liked that he can hold it together in public.

This kid, though? Jon? He is THE WORST. He pumps his fists and gloats every time he wins a point and cries and misbehaves every time he loses. And by cry, I mean literally cry: open mouth, wailing, the whole ugly shebang. Then he gets angry and hits balls over to other courts or kicks them into corners. If a coach reprimands him, he acts out even worse.

So of course, this session he’s in Simon’s group every week for the full 6-week run. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. The other kids are a competitive, fun, and sportsmanship minded group. They cheer in victory, fake wail in defeat, high-five each other, and generally bring out the best in each other with regard to tennis and social skills.

This past Sunday was a particularly rough session for Jon. I asked Simon what he made of the situation afterwards, and his answers were illuminating.

“What would you say to Jon if you could when he acts out?”

“I’d say, ‘Dude, you’re 10. You should be over this already.'”

“Does it ruin the fun at all for the rest of you?”

“Oh yeah. Sometimes we just give each other the look that says, ‘Maybe we should just let him win so he’ll not cry and we can go on with the game.'”

“Would you actually do that? Let him win?”

“Oh heck no! We just think about it and know it’d be easier.”

“Does Jon have any friends in the group?”

“No. He used to. But then everyone saw how he was, and now he doesn’t.”

Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

Here’s where I’ve landed on this. I think judging and disliking the child is probably a poor and presumptuous response. It’s certainly unkind. I don’t know if Jon has school issues, personality/brain wiring issues, family issues, or medical issues. I’m a grown-up and should have compassion.

On the other hand, his behavior is making things less fun for the five other kids out there, none of whom display the same poor sportsmanship and most of whom are younger. Given Jon’s position as the stand-out poor sport, I think group tennis is not the right place for him now. Someone, preferably his mother, needs to explain to Jon that if he cannot behave better in tennis clinics, he’ll have to stop taking them. There needs to be repercussions and limits, for his sake as well as that of the other kids.

I’m not holding my breath for that happen though, and I’m not sure how long wisdom and compassion on my end is going to hold out.

*Name changed.

He handled that pretty gracefully, too, which highlighted what my post should have been about all along: The Value of Competition.

By virtue of being athletic and competitive, Simon is getting an education in an arena I have virtually no experience in. When I was growing up, I was competitive about grades, project-based academic competitions, and (sometimes) art. But neither of these things are determined in a single outing or in a single moment, and in both areas you are competing against your own best efforts as much as anything else. Nor did I compete much in board games, partly because my family didn’t play them much owing to others’ (echem, my oldest brother’s) difficulty losing.

It’s sad but true that I adapted something akin to a “If I can’t win, I won’t compete” philosophy. I got past this (mostly) long ago, but it’s still a gap in my experience, and sometimes it affects how I discuss competitions with Simon.

What I learned in the past 30 days is that I should just be quiet, because to quote William Wordsworth, “the child is the father of the man.” Simon doesn’t need any counsel from me. Let’s start with how to lose. Simon’s U-9 team was invited to a tournament at which his team was wholly out-classed. Our club, LSA, was playing select teams from other clubs where only the best (and tallest!) made the team and where weekly games involve regional travel. The teams we played had no weak links: no slow kids, confused kids, or ball-hogging kids. It’s not that their best players were better than our best players, it’s that they had four times as many of them.

And so Simon and 8 of his friends and their parents traveled to Cincinnati for back-to-back thumpings. After the second thrashing on Saturday, everyone knew or at least strongly suspected what in store for them on Sunday. At Simon’s age, I would have given up, pouted, gotten mad, or tried to quit. Possibly all of these things. Simon did no such thing. He went out there, played his best every time, kept his head up, and found personal satisfaction where he could, like when he scored in the first game and set up an assist in the last. See how traumatized these boys look:

Exactly. On the Sunday drive home, Simon summarized the weekend thusly:

“I don’t think my team had the technical skills to compete in that tournament.”

How much wisdom lies in that short statement? Simon understood that he was playing more competitive teams, and with that understanding came acceptance. He knew there was no shame in losing to a better team, so he didn’t feel any. He just went out there, gave it his all, and chalked it up to experience. I got to the same place myself, but it took me longer, and that second game on Saturday was painful.

On the flip side, when Simon’s same U-9 team ran up a score against a much weaker team in the last regular game of the season, none of the boys celebrated very much. After the first few goals they understood they were going to win and dialed down the exuberance. I remember Simon telling me later that day that their opponents weren’t very good and that they shouldn’t make too much of the win or do anything to make the other team feel bad.

The Goldilocks competition came this past weekend, in the aforementioned Elizabethtown tournament. The field was pretty even, with either team having a chance to win or lose each game. The end result was exhilarating for Simon’s U-10 team and all the parents—seriously, an otherwise dignified and somewhat restrained  highly successful professional mother hugged me so hard she picked me up—but the best and most lasting takeaway for me is that Simon played just as hard in near certain defeat as he did in a hotly contested battle.

He’s got this. And while he’d much rather win, it’s the thrill of competition that does it for him, not any assurances of victory. Nope, the trophy is just the cherry on top of the delicious soccer (or tennis, or running) sundae.

Among the 8s and 9s, I’m still feeling my way. It might sound silly that I’ve been concerned about this, but I don’t want to socially isolate Simon by publicly babying him. I’ve picked up some things. Like, I figured out that I need to get Simon his own sports bag so he can haul his uniform changes, warm-up jacket, water, etc. to games on his own. And I know that it would be totally OK to drop him off at practice and then come back an hour and a half later to pick him up.

We’ve also figured out that it’s best to encourage Simon to leave us to play with his peers as soon as possible. Where it gets trickier is with untied shoes and pennies. Can we tie an untied shoe? Can we help put on the penny during a scrimmage and criss-cross the straps so they don’t fall off his shoulders and distract him?

The penny thing is no minor matter. Once one goes on Simon, he might as well be shackled. He spends all his time holding it in front of his chest, which means that he loses his balance, speed, and focus on the game. Watching Simon scrimmage—or, heaven forbid, actually play a game—in a penny is one of the most miserable parenting experiences I have yet endured short of colic and projectile vomiting. It’s a distant third, granted, but still no picnic.

Thankfully, resolution to my parenting quandaries has come from different sides. We’ve been able to tip off the coach that Simon needs help in some situations and mirror other meddling parents in others. Better still, Simon has resolved some situations all on his own. His growing acquaintance with the big kids has made it easier for him to dive right in at practice, as has his extremely chatty and cordial relationship with the coaches.*

As for the penny, that resolved itself in the best and least expected way possible. He figured out how to put the thing on and criss-cross the straps himself. This was no evolution: One day he struggled like a tuna in a net, putting his head through an armhole and getting the whole thing upside-down and backwards. The next he did it all himself.

Then again, Simon isn’t as U-9 as he used to be. He’s now 7 1/2 and is figuring out how to do more and more on his own. I should have realized from the start that I wouldn’t be the only one watching and mirroring the big boys. The funny thing is, I should have known that it would go this way. As the youngest of three, I was in quite a rush to grow up and catch up to the older boys myself as a child.

*Simon watches more soccer than most kids, so he and the coaches like to jaw about games and players. That’s always been the case. He also garners attention by being very attentive in practice. Of late, something else has come up. One of Simon’s new assistant coaches is a man named Duke. Duke is from Malawi, and I have heard through the grapevine that some of the boys struggle to understand him because of his accent. Not Simon! Here’s a boy that went through his key language acquisition period conversing with Southern Sudanese two to three times a week. I’m not sure if Simon realizes Duke has an accent. It’s a win-win, because not only does Simon love chatting with Duke, but Duke seeks him out as well and has given Simon some impressive one-to-one instruction.

It was glorious. Well, Matt would say there were too many fits and starts about what we were going to do next and who would do what, but to him—the contrary child—I would answer as follows: (1) You’re right; we’ll be better coordinated next year. (2) That’s part of the traditional seder service, and some fits and starts will probably always be there. We Jews aren’t as down on the super choreographed rituals as other religions are.

My getting-to-be-traditional second night seder features friends and their daughter, who is not quite eight. As Simon is halfway to eight himself and pretty mature for his age, my friend and I agreed that we’d leave the kiddie props unused and see if we could manage an abridged but traditional seder, complete with all the major blessings, lots of Hebrew singing, and the traditional oral re-telling of the Passover story, AKA the magid.

I have to say that Simon exceeded my expectations. He sat politely at the table, watched the goings on with interest, sang along when he could (thank goodness for Dayenu, the Hebrew song with a one-word chorus!), and enthusiastically searched for the Afikomen. Best of all from my perspective, when it was time to take turns around the table reading the English explanations for the symbolic foods on the seder plate and to tell the story of the Hebrews in Egypt, he enthusiastically volunteered to join the grown-ups and take his turn.

That he did so with confidence and fluency was just the icing on the flour-less cake. I have pretty great memories of family seders from my childhood and remember how proud I felt when I could start joining in with the reading and chanting. Watching Simon read from the same haggadah I used as a young girl and seeing the pride on his face brought it all rushing back.

Happy Passover everyone!

“Simon, you’re my best friend!” Griffen happily declared.

“You are in my top 3,” Simon replied, which I suspect was not the desired answer.

Just a few days later, towards the beginning of a sleep-over, I overheard Simon say the following to his friend Rhys:

“You are my second-best friend.”

How touching! I cringed and could not understand why my normally sweet and empathetic child was being so tone deaf. Then it occurred to me: This all derives from Simon’s obsessive need to order, quantify, and rank things. It’s never enough for a team to be “great” or “one of the best in the world” for Simon. He has to know absolutely where they rank.

The same goes for tall people, where we’ve discussed the tallest in his school, our city, and the world. Or speed, where we’ve had to learn which car has gone the fastest and how fast that is. Ditto tallest building, shortest person, longest-lived animal, fastest animal, points and goal differential for major soccer teams, and any other thing you can think of that has—or could have—a number attached to it.

The great beauty of this brain is that Simon has a natural and fluent facility with numbers. He’s about 1/2 way through memorizing his multiplication tables, can handle negative and positive numbers, and enjoys learning about squares, square roots, and factorials. I’m pretty sure he’s going to be a major math geek, and I mean that in a good way.

The not-so-beautiful thing about this brain is that he can get hung up on details to the point of annoyance (mine) and exhaustion (mine again), and that sometimes it can make him less than sensitive to his friends. Thus his compulsion to rank his friends. Thus my little chat with him about how you don’t always have to be strictly honest with people if doing so will hurt their feelings.*

I coached him about how say things like “You’re one of my best friends” or “I have a few best friends, and you are one of them” if he’s asked. Along the same lines, we’ve also discussed how to answer questions about school-work, where things are getting stickier by the day. Some of the higher-achieving kids are getting pretty competitive with each other about things like reading levels and number of math facts memorized. Meanwhile, some of the other kids have begun making comments to Simon about his grades, math skills, or general academic ability.

Here, my strategy is to get Simon to deflect and re-direct. I don’t want him spitting out his scores and rankings on various tests or online programs. I’d rather he learn to give a non-answer and then either praise the high-achieving kid for his or her own progress or encourage the less-high-achieving that he or she will get there in their own time.

Talk about verbal jujitsu! I really do know that this is too much to expect of a child Simon’s age. But if we don’t practice, he’ll never get there, and I do not want an obnoxious, braggart of a son. Nor do I want a son who is academically advanced but socially deficient. And honestly, I’d rather not have a child who is hung up on the wrong kind of numbers in the first place, because it can inhibit trying new things and only tells a small part of anyone’s story.

That last bit is going to be a tough sell for Simon. How can numbers not hold ultimate truth? So until we can have meaningful discussions about things like motivation, test bias, and un-quantifiable attributes, I’m sticking with dodging the question and lying when necessary.

That’s Simon with his bestie, Caroline, of course. The pair played something called “Canadian Singles” in which one player plays against two on the other side. Caroline’s dad, Barry, did the honors for most of the day, Matt played with Carrie and relieved Barry after a while, and I stayed safely behind the camera lens, where I couldn’t get in the way or cause problems.

• Monday: home after school
• Tuesday: team soccer practice from 6-7
• Wednesday: home after school
• Thursday: Soccer extra practice (Talent School) from 5:30-6:30
• Friday: home after school
• Saturday: soccer game in the a.m.; drum lesson after lunch
• Sunday: tennis lesson from 1-2:30

Then a funny thing happened. Our outdoor soccer season at Louisville Soccer Alliance began before our indoor soccer season at Mockingbird ended, and Simon wasn’t interested in giving anything up. Our life got crazy with a schedule that looked like this:

• Monday: LSA soccer from 6-7:30
• Tuesday: Mockingbird soccer from 6-7
• Wednesday: LSA soccer from 6-7:30
• Thursday: Mockingbird Talent School from 5:30-6:30
• Friday: home after school
• Saturday: soccer game in the a.m., drum lesson and LSA soccer practice in the p.m.
• Sunday: tennis from 1-2:30

Madness! We joked—only very slightly—that school was something we fit into Simon’s athletic schedule as best we could. This was clearly too much, and as soon as the winter session at Mockingbird ended, we were going to wrap up all indoor soccer and maybe take a break from tennis, too. It was time to reclaim family time!

Of course that’s not at all what happened. What happened is that after his final Talent School practice two weeks ago today (the one where we doped him on caffeine), Simon got teary in the car about not wanting to quit talent school with Coach Darren. It didn’t help my case at all that Coach Darren complimented him in an email to me and I could plainly see the results of the Talent School myself.

Thursday was back on.

We were still going to go on tennis hiatus. Now that Salil was going to move up, the timing was perfect. Except the coaches told Salil’s dad that he needed one more session before he’d ready to move to the intermediate group. Salil was overjoyed with the news because that meant he got to stay with Simon! Both boys were overjoyed in fact; they smiled and hugged and jumped up and down at the prospect of getting to stay together.*

I cannot split up such a happy friendship. Sunday tennis was back on.

So here’s what “taking back our family time” and “dialing down on the scheduled madness” looks like:

• Monday: LSA practice from 6-7:30
• Tuesday: free evening
• Wednesday: LSA practice from 6-7:30
• Thursday: Mockingbird Talent School from 5:30-6:30
• Friday: free evening
• Saturday: Soccer game (two games this weekend) in the a.m., drum lesson after lunch
• Sunday: tennis from 1-2:30

Yeah, we totally dialed down the extra-curriculars and reclaimed family time! I vaguely disapprove of this schedule. It represents all the over-scheduled and micro-managed qualities of modern childhood that I feel I should be fighting against. On the other hand, there aren’t a ton of kids around us playing in back-yards after school, Simon loves soccer more than anything (including me), and he enjoys tennis and has made a special friend in Salil.

Meanwhile, he just jumped up a level in reading, is working on his multiplication facts for fun, and brought home a stellar report card two weeks ago. Most importantly, he seems happy and eager 99% of the time. I’m beginning to think that my issues about Simon’s schedule are just that: my issues. Until something changes, I’m going to fuel up the car and get used to rolling with it.

—

*Simon and Salil might get to play together more than I thought. To my pleasant surprise, the coaches informed me that Simon will likely move up to the intermediate group with Salil. Salil is still taller and stronger than Simon, but some of the power differential disappeared once we got Simon a bigger racket. Simon’s strengths on the tennis court are his forehand spin, a result of being left-handed; his backhand, which he took to more easily than most; and his footwork, which is a direct result of all that soccer he plays. Tennis pros love soccer players.

The first incident happened at the preschool. There is a boy in one of the classes, I’ll call him Lennon, who suffers from some pretty serious cognitive and physical impairments. He’s had seizures in the past, and I think there may be some intellectual deficits as well. I don’t know his story, but the rumor that came my way is that the boy’s issues stem from medical malpractice during delivery. It’s a tragedy.

Lennon cannot fully participate in class. It’s hard to know how much attention he’s capable of sustaining, and he simply doesn’t have the cognitive, social, or motor skills to keep up with his peers. I have always viewed him as something of an island.

Monday changed that. He was struggling to settle in my room when another child, a girl I’ll call Bailey, approached him, wrapped her arms around him, and soothed him into his seat. I was astounded at her kindness and empathy. Frankly, I was also more than a little humbled. So often I’ve had to swallow my frustration as Lennon runs around in class—frequently right over my feet—and makes teaching a challenge. He can upset my need for order, and little Bailey’s natural instinct to accept and help was something I could do with a bit more of.

Then there is little Abdullah, Simon’s newest class-mate. He’s a Somali Bantu, and from what I understand, he arrived directly from a refugee camp within the past week or so. He doesn’t speak a word of English, and the class is resorting to crude sign language to communicate with him. (He does have one other Somali Bantu in his class, and I think that other child can communicate a little with him.) His first day in class was last Friday, and today (Thursday) was my first chance to see him as I volunteered to chaperone a class field trip.

I expected to find a shy and shell-shocked young child struggling to make sense of his new surroundings. I instead found a child who appeared to be quite happy and already settling into his new life. In fact, if I didn’t know the children in Simon’s class already, I would not necessarily have been able to identify Abdullah as the new boy without close observation.

According to the teacher, the class has decided to make Abdullah their project. They know he’s new and has to learn everything about life in America, and they have decided to be his classmates, friends, and best teachers. I give them all high marks, but I’m singling out Isaiah and Bella for A+, gold star recognition.

Isaiah knows a few children who were adopted from Ethiopia. He therefore took it upon himself to be Abdullah’s first friend and mentor. He chose Abdullah as his field trip buddy today and never left the child’s side. They held hands, hugged, sat close together, and smiled through the entire day, with Isaiah never pulling away to socialize with his English-speaking friends. At the same age—heck, even today—I would have begun with good intentions and then had my desperate need for verbal interaction cut short my efforts. Isaiah’s dedication and generosity humbled me in much the same way little Bailey’s did.

And then there is Bella. Bella is the class ambassador: first to volunteer for something, first to raise her hand, first to welcome a guest, and first to thank a guest when it’s time for them to leave. Not surprisingly, Bella has decided that acclimatizing and defending Abdullah is in her job description. So it came to pass that when a science center employee went to chastize Abdullah for not standing or sitting where he was supposed to (he couldn’t understand the instructions, of course), Bella charged up to the front of the group, stood right in front of the employee, put up her hand in a stop-right-there gesture, and said her piece:

“No. You don’t understand. Abdullah is from Somalia. He doesn’t know English yet, and he doesn’t understand you. We’ll show him what to do. You can’t yell at him like that.”

Attagirl, Bella. Needless to say, the employee backed down quickly as the teacher and parent chaperones watched on and smiled. The poor science center employee couldn’t have known, and no one was really upset with him. It’s just that it was completely awesome to see a seven-year-old successfully champion for the rights of a new classmate and friend.

Never in a million years did I think it could feel so good to be so regularly humbled.

Nearly three months later, I have my answer. My mom was right to be concerned about the social aspect, but she got the script flipped. At Mockingbird and at the Louisville Tennis Club, Simon has held his own as a player and made friends among teammates and fellow players. The problem is that some of these friends are ready to move on to higher divisions based on their age or skill, and that is making Simon (and them) a little sad.

Two of his soccer teammates have approached me about the next session, as they’d like to play together again. As would I; these are good kids. But Simon will be playing spring and fall soccer outside, and by the time we move back indoors in November, he will be 8 and his best soccer friends will be 10 and have aged out of his division. So he’ll have to start all over in the friends division. I’m sure there are some great 8-year-olds out there, but somehow Simon only befriended the 9-year-olds.

On the tennis court, Simon’s best friend is Salil, who is also 9. They are well matched when it comes to personality, interests, and ability. However, as you would expect, Salil is taller and more powerful than Simon on the court. Today the boys were asking about the next session of tennis, and Salil was begging his dad to stay in Simon’s group. If Simon returns right away (we might take a break for a few months), I assume he’d need to stay in the age 9-10 advanced beginner clinic. Salil, meanwhile, is probably ready for the intermediate/advanced clinic for the same age group.

Salil’s dad and I both recognize that the boys are probably going to be split up, but the boys themselves were highly resistant. I have to confess that as Salil was pushing the issue with his father, a selfish part of me was hoping he’d not be ready and/or his dad would give in. After every clinic these days, the two of them rush off the courts, find a chair to share in the viewing room, and have fun watching the high schoolers  that play after them. As I watch them together—Simon in the chair and Salil perched on the armrest—I am acutely aware of how lucky I am that Simon has befriended such an energetic, friendly, and sweet boy.

But you can’t coach height or strength, and while Simon is tall*, coordinated, and focused for his age, he is still 7. He can’t go play soccer with the 10-year-olds, and he’s probably not ready to be in an advanced tennis group with 9- and 10-year-olds, either. Meanwhile, Salil’s dad is absolutely right to move Salil up if the coaches say he’s ready. I’d do the same in his place.

Still, it’s a little sad. I wonder if it’s also inevitable. I always had friends who were older than me, and that meant I spent a lot of time in my childhood saying goodbye and starting over as my friends moved on to new schools. I think Matt was much the same, so it’s no surprise that Simon, too, gravitates to older children. That’s all fine and dandy until they move on to middle school, high school, and college, at which time it can get a little lonely.

There’s really nothing to be done here. I have no doubt that moving Simon up was the right thing; he was ready for the 60′ tennis court and the larger soccer field. So there’s no regret here. Just the observation and slight sadness that moves such as this involve inevitable trade-offs, and that the trade-off in these cases appears to be early separation from sports friends.

*We finally had his 7-year exam two weeks ago. At 52.5 inches, Simon is taller than the average 8-year-old and is only a half inch off the average for 9. I suspect that he’s going to follow Matt’s pattern and reach his full adult height earlier than average. If he doesn’t, he’s on track to top 6 feet, which seems unlikely given my own stature.

Meanwhile, there was a another boy, Griffen, who was an excellent match for Simon. A fact that, ironically, it took the end of preschool for Simon to fully appreciate. I spent years trying to push him in Griffen’s direction, only for the friendship to fully blossom after they went to separate schools for kindergarten. Better late than never I suppose.

Last year, too, Simon needed some help on the friends front when he encountered a friend who wasn’t always very nice to him. He also struggled to find boys who wanted to play the same way he did, with many of his peers wanting to run, chase, and tackle, and Simon wanting to play in a more organized fashion. At the end of kindergarten, Simon had one true best friend and a bunch of friendly acquaintances.

This year, the peer relations are much easier. Simon has identified a core group of nearly perfectly behaved, academically achieving, quiet kids, and he is sticking with them. These are the kids whose behavior color charts are only on the positive side, who compete with each other on online reading and math games, who are always nice to each other, and who are almost certainly destined to end up at the district’s most competitive high school.

Even better, Simon has met two lovely Brandeis children at soccer and tennis. Mia is a smart, sporty, and sweet third grader who plays on Simon’s soccer team; and Salil is a smart, sporty, silly (in a good way), and sweet third grader who plays tennis with Simon. These two are such great role models that I find myself grateful to them for being willing to hang out with a younger child.

And of course, Simon’s best friend remains Caroline, with whom I don’t think he’s ever had a cross word. That friendship is now five years old and continues to amaze me. In fact, the other day when I was teasing Simon about how much he loves soccer, the only thing he’d admit to liking more than soccer—including his father and I!—was Caroline. “But, sssshhh,” he told me. “Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hurt soccer’s feelings.”

So this should be the year that I do nothing where peer relations are concerned, the year I sit back and enjoy stress-free socializing.

If only it were that easy. One of his friends from last year, a smart and energetic kid I’m genuinely fond of, is starting to become an issue. Specifically, he’s threatening to tell on Simon for things he hasn’t done, was asking for and/or taking his lemonade at lunch, and was doing some other things that bothered or frightened Simon. At the same time, this child was also sending Simon notes about getting together for play dates, making him a huge custom card for Valentine’s day, and generally trying to advance the friendship.

Simon feels stuck. On the one hand, he doesn’t like how X is treating him. On the other hand, he’s afraid of hurting X’s feelings and wants to be friends. And on the third hand (Third hand? I guess this is where the metaphor falls apart!), he’s genuinely afraid of getting in trouble for something he didn’t do.

The third part is easy. I’ve mostly convinced Simon that if a child with a reputation for telling tales accuses him of doing something he’s never done and that is out of character for him, that the teacher is not going to punish him. He’s still anxious about this but almost believes me. I’ve also mostly convinced him that if X says or does something against class rules, he needs to say “no” and then ask for help from a grown-up if X doesn’t listen.That part is a little trickier.

The middle part is trickiest of all. I am nearly certain that Simon wants to be friends with X. I am absolutely certain that X wants to be friends with Simon, quite possibly more than anyone else in the class. The only way I see out of this is for Simon to coach X and learn to say things like “I don’t like it when you do/say that”, or “friends don’t do/say that to each other”, or even “if you want to be friends with me, you can’t do/say that.”

It’s a tall order for anyone, especially a 7-year-old. But if he can pull it off, I think it might be a win-win for everyone involved. That’s one mighty big if, though.