It should have been a positive experience — you don’t expect to come home from a Cub Scout meeting with an upset little boy, but that’s what happened. After the meeting, all the den leaders and assistants gathered for a quick meeting and the boys went off to play for a while. The Boy walked over last, and when he did, everyone decided to play Sharks and Minnows and declared that the Boy was the shark.
I instantly had a bad feeling about it.
“Minnows in!” E shouted enthusiastically, and everyone ran into the play area, dodged the Boy’s attempts at tagging them, and made it to the other side.
“Minnows in!” E shouted, still smiling, still enthusiastically.
The same thing happened.
Then the taunting started. It wasn’t mean-spirited taunting. “Nana nana boo boo you can’t catch me” — that type of thing. But the truth was, the Boy couldn’t catch them. Several of them were just too fast because they were naturally faster or because they were older, and the Boy still has not developed a good Sharks and Minnows strategy. (Then again, who has?)
And so they continued. Two times. Three times. Four times. Each time, the Boy shouted “Minnows in!” with the same enthusiasm and smile, but I could tell it was starting to be strained.
Finally, after the fifth time, with the taunting increasing, I called the Boy over and said, “Time to go.”
“Okay,” he said. No begging to stay. No asking for five more minutes. Just a quick response and a jog over to my side.
As we left, one of the boys said, “I could walk to the other side, and you couldn’t get me.”
“How’d you feel about that?” I asked as we walked to the car.
“Bad.”
We talked about it more on the way home, and the Boy declared simply, “Scouts are not supposed to act like that.”
There was no real maliciousness in the boys’ actions. They were just first- and second-grade boys being silly boys. But our boy — the Boy, forever capitalized — is especially sensitive to such things.
“I’ve learned I can’t trust a lot of people,” he confided on the way home.
It was a sad parenting decision, but I suggested that might be a good idea. Sometimes it’s best to be a little skeptical about people, I explained, in simpler terms. “Trust is something we earn. Don’t just give it away.”
We got back to the house, snuggled a little, and everything seemed okay, but tonight, while brushing his teeth, he confided to K, “I just can’t stop thinking about it.”
Neither can I.