DS is 9. I WOTH full time and my husband is at home fulltime, but has a chronic illness so can't do everything that some parents manage. There is a wonderful network of friends locally who spend a lot of time with ds as a result.
This evening when I went to pick up ds from an activity, one of my friends took me aside and asked me if ds was OK. If he is in a big group, she says he tends to walk away and be on his own. She has seen it quite often, including this evening. He does fine with one or two friends.
Ds never used to be like this, he was always the most sociable of children, but he is older now and it's OK for things to change, obviously. I find, though that I just don't have the first idea how to try to get ds to open up about this. Last year and briefly this year, ds was bullied, and talking to him about it was like pulling teeth. The school were fab, actually, and he is currently having some weekly support, a kind of mix between play therapy and 1:1 PSHE.
When you do emotional intelligence type conversations with a child, where do you begin?? Sometimes when I come home after a full day at work, my antennae for ds's emotions are off, and I end up going in too intensely, or just getting the atmosphere wrong.