Breaking the Mold to Embrace Kindness in a Cruel World

What we teach our kids will shape the future.

Marilyn Regan
5 min readMar 5, 2024
Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash

The story in the Boston Globe could be one of sexual misconduct or of bullying, by minors. It’s both.

It could be a passage out of Lord of the Flies.

In the basement of a friend’s home, the friends of a developmentally delayed boy convinced him to take off his clothes. He didn’t want to, but they told him it would be “fun.”

So he did.

One of the boys took out his phone and shot a picture, which he then shared. Of course! Why else would you take a picture?

What followed has been a 17-month ordeal for the boy’s parents, trying to have the incident investigated properly. Throughout this time, the pictures continued circulating at a boy’s basketball camp and on Snapchat.

The police investigation concluded it was a “boys-will-be-boys-incident” and a parental matter. Local officials tried to hide it. The District Attorney reprimanded the family for failing to file charges before pressing the issue.

But then again, the boy that took the picture was a police officer’s son; a detective’s. It explains a lot. Then again, so is the paternal grandfather of the boy who was bullied.

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Marilyn Regan

Marilyn is a writer, yogi, and spiritual medium. Her favorite people are animals, especially ones that meow. She loves the ocean and hates one-use plastic.