Weeding Little Boys

My husband, Mike, and I were talking about his plans for the day and he mentioned taking our then five-year-old son, Nick, for a ride on the lawn mower. I said, “Great idea! The lawn needs mowing anyway.” He said no, it didn’t, so I couldn’t help but point out that the grass was knee high. Mike explained that you don’t mow the lawn for the first time in the spring until you’ve weeded it first to prevent the weeds from being flung far and wide. Of course, he said, you have to weed it again towards the fall when the weeds begin to return ...

Which got me to thinking. 

Our son was born with several challenges that we had been fortunate to have diagnosed early on, and he’d been receiving special education at the local public school since he was two. At that time we were preparing to take Nick out of Pre-K in the public school system and enroll him in a private school for Kindergarten because we didn’t want him influenced by some of the undesirable behavior we saw in some of the children in the local public school. In effect we were planning to “weed” the bad influences from his life early on so he could grow to his greatest potential. And so we transferred him to what we’d been told was a wonderful Christian school. 

But it wasn’t.

Within a matter of days, my sweet little boy began to change. He was in trouble at school on a daily basis, which meant he was in more trouble at home, and we had absolutely no idea why he had suddenly become a sullen, angry, mean child. Among his many challenges, he was at that point still mostly non-verbal; so we couldn’t just ask what was wrong and discuss it with him.

The bad behavior progressed exponentially until one day when I happened to linger behind for a few minutes after bringing him to school. What I observed broke my heart. Because of his disabilities, my sweet son had been singled out for ridicule and torment by the other children with the full knowledge and implied consent of the teacher who, when told what I had observed, just shrugged her shoulders, threw up her hands and smiled at me.

When my husband and I withdrew him from the school and tucked him safely into the car for the long ride home, we told him that he would never have to go back there again because they had been so mean to him. He considered that for a few moments, then began rocking in his car seat and repeating, “21 days. 21 days. 21 days.” My heart broke again as I realized that he had been enrolled in that school for exactly 21 school days.

Though we thought we had been quick to “weed” the bad influences by removing him from the situation, we found we were too late. Not only had our son’s fragile self-esteem been badly damaged by the constant ridicule of his peers, he had learned that he couldn’t trust those who were supposed to protect him:  his teacher, who permitted the torment, and us, who in our ignorance of his anguish punished him further for getting into trouble at school. And so he learned to protect himself by building a wall of anger and mistrust, lashing out at any perceived injustice.

The weeds had been flung far and wide in that springtime of change, leaving us with many weeds of anger and bad behavior to pull. We’d no sooner pull one behavioral weed than another would spring up in its place. The bad behavior he had learned while defending himself from 19 brats and one uncaring teacher took his new teacher and us almost nine months to bring under control, but we were finally able to do so with daily doses of gospel-centered weed killer:  love, patience, and kind words.

Of course, we’ll have to continue to “weed” him periodically to ensure the bad influences we’re trying to protect him from are removed as quickly as they appear. But with constant weeding and fertilizing with gospel nourishment, we should be able to raise a good lawn – I mean son.