As the parent of a child with Asperger’s, I appreciate the balanced, Evans-Manning-worthy comment of our reader Elijah, on the bullying-the-Aspie thread. Elijah points out that these cases are often more complicated than they seem. Elijah runs a school for kids on the spectrum, so he’s speaking from experience:

Well, I will tell you that part (if not most) of the socialization nightmare starts with parents. Parents who don’t discipline their kids, don’t teach them any respect, morals, or ethics, or common decency, don’t expose them to different people, don’t talk about differences, etc. etc. So when Kid meets Aspie, he knows only that Aspie is ‘weird’ and so he joins the group of other ignoramuses and laughs at Aspie.

And then you’ve got the parents of Aspie, who insist that little Aspie is made of spun glass, and must be treated a certain way, according to the 23,765 rules parent delivered to the principal and teachers and which must be followed at all times.

Or the parents who let Aspie/ADHD watch TV in their room with or without their gaming console and laptop with the result that they go to school next day and act out a scene from Family Guy, ending up confused, dejected, and mocked when it is received like a fart in chapel.

I have no patience with bullying of any sort, but the bigger the school, the more complicated the issues involved. My little school for kids on the spectrum is 17, and we STILL have to watch like hawks for behavior problems.

Sorry to rant here, but last year we had a young man apply to our school who was being expelled from public school. Mom was kind, but evasive when I asked her what, precisely, led to the expulsion. Upon calling the kid’s former Principal, I learned that he was an Aspie (I knew that) who continually disrupted class by telling a joke. Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, I thought. “You mean he tells jokes to the class?” I asked. “No. He tells the same three ‘Dumb Blonde’ jokes to the girls in his class.” “Is that really the reason you expelled him?” “Yes; he chased them in the hallways. He ran after them to the buses. After the 187th time last Monday…” “Wait. You counted the number of times he told the jokes?” “Of course. It became an issue of harassment. His parents blew me off, and the boy’s therapist said it was his coping mechanism, that he was trying to be friendly. With any other boy, we’d have had the police in here thinking the boy was a stalker. Overall, he probably ‘told’ his jokes to those girls thousands of times.” I did not say this to the mother, but I thought it: sister, your kid’s not just an Aspie, he’s an a**hole. And you’ve made no effort to help him, just to excuse his behavior.

Preach it.

Lest I come off as an Aspie-blamer, so to speak, I was bullied to some degree and have no patience for kids picking on each other. I just think getting to the root of the problem involves parents as much as kids.