my sons are trying to impress the bullies to avoid being bullied

[brightontwinmum]

I have twin boys who are almost 9. They are getting into a lot of trouble at school because they are hanging around with the tough, 'naughty' kids and getting up to quite serious mischief. They both explained to me that they do these things to be 'in their gang', rather than be bullied. So they are behaving badly to be accepted by the bullies. The bullies all have fairly serious emotional problems so I am loath to judge them too harshly but I don't want my kids hanging around with them. It's that old chestnut of other kids being a 'bad influence'. Any clues as to how to deal with this?

Oh dear, not really sure. So I'll bump for you in hope that someone comes along who has some ideas.

I'd talk to them abt good behaviour and doing what is right and letting the teacher know what the bullying...

OP I noticed this thread a couple of days ago as I'm trying to deal with a similar situation but much younger children. I'm going back to the school today to ask them to work out a plan. The teachers are reluctant to separate the children. I am not sure what to do yet.

The main tools I can think of are talking to the other parents. Our school have explicitly discouraged this up to now with catastrophic results - another parent took her child out of the school, probably we could have cleared it up had we talked.

I then think the children need close supervision during free play and strong support to encourage them into being kind and thoughtful.

The only other thing I can think of is taking my child out of school at lunchtime. I would hate it to come to this obviously.

Does that help?