Gentle boy & rough play at school

[Brokendisc]

Hi my DS aged 5 seems to be struggling with friendships at school because he doesn’t enjoy rough play. It’s a fairly small school and he tells me that all the boys in his class enjoy mostly playing games that he thinks are “scary” and involve “fighting”. He prefers to play tag, hide and seek etc. There is one boy in his class who will sometimes not get involved in the rough play but he’s a bit erratic and when he drops my son to play these games he will tell him he can’t play with them my son gets really down about this like he was today. I’ve asked him to join in with the girls games but he says the girls say that boys are yucky.

Any suggestions for how to help him as it break my heart to see him down. Should I just accept this is playground life? Should I try to help my son to be less affected by this stuff? Should I encourage DH to do more rough play with him?

You can play younger games on consoles. We always had a family console in the lounge until DS was much older. And games were age appropriate and also meant there had to be consideration for others who were in the lounge, watching tv etc. Many of his peers had their own console in their own room from a very early age. Something I would avoid!
But family games on a console can be fun activity.

I'm not sure making the girls the support humans is appropriate. Maybe the boys could be asked to do non-rough play once in a while? I know it's easier to force the girls to solve all the issues but it never works the other way around.

Totally agree, @MrsTerryPratchett

The boys should be reminded to play nicely so all boys can be included.

These things do crop up in the first few years of school as they have to learn to navigate making friends, playing games, how to lose at games and so on. These are skills they have to learn and the school should be supporting them, but you have to as well. Read some books together about friendships, and enrolling him in a sports team is a really good way to help him to make more friends and also to build resilience. Football is often popular with primary school boys, it might help his confidence to eventually have the skills to have a kick about with his friends and steer them away from wrestling or whatever.