His eyes were full of hate, his hands were almost crushing another child's arms, and his voice was loud and clear. A crowd of children were gathering around them as he continued to punish the other child for something that I was unaware of. There was no sign of an adult near them so I figured they were there alone. But then I thought, who would let a 7 year old boy run around at an adventure park all alone? I could see that the victim started to tear up and the fear was heartbreaking, but it wasn’t until I saw the knife that I decided to step in. My eyes went black as I ran up to the child that was attacking, and grabbed him, got the knife from his small hands and called for an officer.

The next thing I remember, because I was too shocked to think straight, was that I had a parent in front of me going nuts and screaming “What are you doing to my child, grabbing him by his arms, you should be ashamed of yourself.” I couldn’t even speak. The only thing I could think about was the child with a knife and how he was talking to the other boy. 

I am still wondering where his hate came from. I later found out that the victim of the two boys did not do anything to the boy who attacked him. So why did he do it? If I wasn’t there to stop it, one of them could have died for no reason at all.

At the age of 10, children have probably been filled with as much information as possible on how to act as a human being. We are most likely going to change our attitudes, manors and so on during our lifetime, but as a young child you are a like a sponge wandering around and absorbing all the information you can get of the people around you. The most important factor to know when it comes to children is that children will never do as we tell them to, but they will do what we do. Children with anger problems must have parents with issues or siblings that are either in their puberty where we all can relate to some of the behaviors such hating our parents, hating our life etc, or they just have a lack of love in their home.

When a child is low on love he starts to act out in ways where he knows he will get attention and that someone will care about what he does, whether it is good or bad. We have to remember that in a child’s mind, all attention is good attention.

This dangerous behavior will follow him throughout his life because a learned behavior is very difficult to change or control, especially when it comes to a learned behavior that has lead to some kind of attention. The human being is created to love, and we just have to do whatever we can to make sure that small children around us can feel it – not with knifes or bad words – but with a hug or a nice word.