Advice about my 14yr old son

LegacyUser

going anon for this one ...

My niece rang me this morning to tell me that it is all over ask.fm that my son is going to get battered by another lad. She says it all stems from an incident that happened at a teenage disco last week.

Basically the story that she gave me was that my son was asked by another lad to hook him up with a girl from their school, and instead of hooking the other guy up, my son 'went' with her himself. Yeh I know ... teenage stuff but it makes me feel a little bit disappointed that my son could be so deceiving. Now it turns out that a quite a few people on ask.fm have been telling this guy to 'batter' my son for the terrible thing he did. They have even been telling him that they will be there for back up and that he should give him(my son) a good seeing to at the next disco or even in the dressing rooms when they have next have a game (which is tonight, as it happens).

On top of this I have also discovered that he had lied to us .. he told us that he had a lift arranged with friend to go to this disco but this fell through (this was never the case as his friend's mum apologised to me this morning for not being able to take him as she had a full car with her own lot). He then took it upon himself to more or less hassle another lad into giving him a lift (I've seen the texts). I know why he probably did it .. he wouldn't have been allowed to go to the disco if he had no-one to go with. The lying thing really bugs me as I have no time for liars and he knows this .. we have always punished more for telling lies than anything else.

My son went through a tough time with bullies when he started in secondary school, it never fully went away but it did settle down .. I suppose I'm afraid that this could start it up again.

So all in all I'm just wondering, what would you guys do .. if anything??

qwertytlk

Hi,

As i see it there are limited things you really can do, depending on how involved you can or want to get or how far you want to take it.

Firstly imo you should talk to him. Get his side of the story. Encourage him to apologise to the other boy involved and See if he can talk to him and they can sort it without anyone getting 'battered'. And of course explain what he did wrong by going off with the girl himself, if it does nothing more than to prevent this situation happening again then it will be well worth it. This is all of course if the ssituation is as the cousin says it is.

Do you know the other boy involved or his parents? Obviously if you feel there is a real threat of violence after talkin to your son then you could speak to the parents of the other boy,or the school/football club, depending on where these matches and said changing rooms are.
Or stop him going to the next disco.

The other issue , as you Said, is the lying. So if you intend to punish him for this, perhaps by keeping him in, then it could be a way of keeping him out of the way until this blows over.

Also you mentioned 'seeing the texts', would he know you have access to these? If not then maybe doing the above might be a great idea if you want to be able to monitor his texts in future, as if he is tipped off to you having access then he might make sure you don't have in future!

I don't know if there are any other options but in regard to the threats of violence then i definitely think you should speak to him and find out how serious these threats are before deciding how much more involvement/intervention is needed on your part.

Hope this helps, best of luck!