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no idea when someone is being nice or being mean too him,so sometimes someone will hit him constantly and he will call them friend.
When James started his new school it was not so much 'if' James would end up getting bullied and hit, it was more a case of when, as he seems to attract the bullies where ever he goes.

This makes my son very vulnerable as when someone speaks to him he immediately assumes they are his friend. It is for this reason that I never let him out of my sight, that and the fact that while most children learn not to speak their mind as they grow, James will tell you or anyone he meets exactly what he thinks of them. If a fat lady walks past, James will tell her she's fat. If a man with a big nose walks past, James will tell him he has a big nose.

New places and situations are difficult for my son and these are the times that people make judgements about him and label him 'naughty' or me a bad mother. I have had people come up to me and ask me why I haven't given him a good hiding. After I have taken a few dozen deep breaths I walk calmly away. I mean, should I stand there and shout at my son for feeling confused or afraid? Would you hit out at someone just because they were lost and didn't know where they were? This is what I would be doing if I hit out at him for showing me in the only way he can that he is not managing a situation very well.

Thats not saying that James isn't naughty at times. He most certainly is, but I have to be careful that I make sure that his punishment is both relevant and immediate. I have to make sure he knows what he has done wrong or else I am actually doing him no good at all and will just confuse him further.

James's world was very different from ours once. Now we are starting to feel the need to share it with him so that he might feel that his is as right as we feel ours is. James thinks very differently from the way we do, and yet his thoughts are strange but so logical.

I had a conversation with him the other day about The Bill. His favourite TV programme. He wanted to know if we could go and say hello to the policemen at Sunhill Station. I explained that it was actually a set and just a TV show. He looked at me and said. "I don't get that."
So I explained how the show was made up of actors who pretended to be policemen because that was their job. James then said that they shouldn't do that " Because pretending to be a policeman was wrong."
So I explained how it was OK because they were actors and they were just pretending. " When they die, they don't really die" says I.
" Of course they do mum" he said. "If they didn't die they'd have come back to work at the station the next day and they didn't, so they must have"
I gave my son a big hug and gave up.

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