Why do neighbors have to be so cruel?

One of the neighbor boys had a birthday party this weekend. And once again our son Cameron was the only neighborhood kid not invited.

The sad thing about it is that Cameron actually plays with this kid more regularly than with the other kids in the neighborhood.

The boy is several years younger than Cameron and Cameron gets along real well with him.

The boy's parents know of Cameron's Asperger's Syndrome because my husband has spoken with them directly about it, but unfortunately Cameron's neighborhood bully that I've mentioned elsewhere at this website has managed to manipulate them into believing that Cameron is a bad kid.

Why do neighbors have to be so cruel and uncaring/unthinking?

Cameron just sat on our front lawn looking sadly down the street towards the party house.

We ended up inviting a kid Cameron knows (he's the younger brother of a friend of our daughter) to come visit and spend the night.

It helped. It didn't make things all better because Cameron knows that he was the only one not invited to the party but it at least helped that he had someone here his age to hang with.

If there's any good that came from this experience -

Our daughter learned how truly cruel adults can be to children, she learned how hard it is on a child to be so blatantly excluded (she actually felt bad for Cameron, which isn't a common occurrence...) and she learned to not automatically exclude specific neighborhood kids when she's a parent herself.

I really wish our neighbors would see this article and recognize themselves and make some changes in how they deal with neighborhood kids with developmental delays but I'm pretty sure they won't ever see it.

One day these neighbors that I speak of are going to be grandparents, and at the rate kids are getting Asperger's Syndrome and other Autistic Spectrum Disorders, there's a good chance one or more of those grandchildren will have Asperger's Syndrome or another ASD.

Then their grandchild(ren) will go through much of what they have put Cameron through and it won't be until then that they'll realize how wrong they were in the way they treated Cameron.

It's a vicious cycle that won't stop until parents develop tolerance for kids' varying issues, and then teach those tolerances to their, and other, kids.