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Comment by dgavey | Hacker News Reader

What a timely article. Just today received a call from the school that my grade 3 son had thrown a girl to the ground threatening her. This was the second incident in a week. A team of councilors and mental health workers were called in as an emergency response team.

The similarities between the child in the article and my son are startling and scary.

Although we are still at the beginning of our story, I do believe that in my area in Canada, the system has gotten better. I can only hope that this continues and the system does not let him down like it did to the child in the article.

My son will be seeing a counselor and accessing services that were previously unavailable to us starting in 2 days. Thanks Hacker News, you are always so poignant.

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I'd go easy on that counselling and do my best to figure out first what actually happened.

It would not be the first time that the visible aggressor was in fact the victim of a long drawn out teasing campaign by a group of bullies, and girls can be bullies just as easy as boys.

One of the best bits of fun seems to be to goad someone until they snap and then let them take the blame for it all.

Been there, done that, have the t-shirt.

I know the useless tunnel that counseling can be all too well. I also know my son. He is not like the rest of the kids. Exceptionally bright, exceptionally short fuse. No energy, always tired and constant sleepwalking or night terrors, and I do believe he may have already had auditory hallucinations. There is a history of mental illness in his lineage.

That being said, I have seen the kids first hand pushing his buttons on the school yard. There are so easy to push it's hard for them to resist. We are working with both the school and some mental health workers to make the situation more livable for all parties. I appreciate your concern, and I do understand that play-yard aggression is often mis-construed. That is most definitely part of this situation.

Ok, super to see you're on top of this and looking at all angles.

School can be hell if you are standing out in whatever way, and cause and effect can be hard to separate sometimes. Night terrors could be causing trouble in school, school trouble could be causing night terrors just the same.

I wish you the very best of luck with this, and I hope that it will all come to a good resolution.

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