DS is 4 yrs. old. He has a soccer ball that he loves to kick around. The neighbors boy (7 yrs.old and my dd's best friend) came over and saw ds playing with his soccer ball so he asked if ds wanted to play with him. We live in a cul-de-sac, so the boys went down and were kicking the ball back and forth. Then some other boys saw this and asked to play. The next thing I know, 4 boys, all much bigger than 4 yr. old ds were playing soccer, keeping score, and basically preventing ds from playing with his own ball. Now, occasionally they would let ds kick the ball and this was just enough to keep him appeased, but the competition got more intense as time went on. I spoke up when I saw ds getting really frustrated and reminded the boys to let ds play.
OK I didn't want to be the mom who rushes in and takes our ball home so that none of the kids get to play, but this was getting extremely frustrating for ds. I was relieved when the sun started going down because I was able to say, "uh oh, time to come in" and ds picked up his ball and started to come in. The original boy asked if he could play in our backyard and I said yes. With just the two of them it wasn't an issue. DH says that we should have just told the other boys that they were not welcome to play, I thought that as long as ds didn't have an issue with what they were doing that we should just let it be.
So, what would you have done? Did I do the right thing in just letting things play out or should I have stepped in sooner?
