WIBTAH if I ended my son's friendships for him
This is obviously a throwaway account.
my (40F) eldest son (10M) can be socially awkward. We have strong suspicion that he is neurospicy (either adhd or Audhd). We're working on getting him a diagnosis, but navigating the health care system where we are is hard.
The past few years in school have been hard for him. He has trouble concentrating and gets angry easily. He's also been bullied by some classmates. He does not make friends easily. As far as I know there are two kids in his class that he hangs out with during school time.
Outside school he has some friends in the neighbourhood. There are two other boys, "V" who used to live across the street (11M) and "R" whose grandparents are our neighbours (11M).
Whenever they play one on one, things are fine, but years ago I already noticed that the three of them cannot play together. It will always result in fighting. When they were 6 or 7 this was expected, but now these boys are teenagers and the fighting seems te be getting worse rather than better.
They say extremely hurtful things to each other. The past two weeks there have been some incidents. The first is that V got upset because the other two were playing at home. He then started threatening them. He sent my son a text message that our dog has cancer and he hopes she dies. (my son is extremely attached to our dog). He also called to say hurtful things about my younger son and started spam calling my son every second for about 10 minutes at 10:30pm. He sent R messages about how my son had been talking about him behind his back.
The second incident happened yesterday. They had apparently made up again and were hanging out outside. After maybe an hour my son came in crying and shaking. He told me that hurtful things had been said again. I gently pressed him to tell me what those things were and he said that R had called me fat and that I would kill our dog. and later said that he also called my husband fat. R apperently also had called our son an "adhd kid". My son tried to walk away from this but the boys came after him calling him a pussy. Then in anger my son made a remark about my R's parents being divorced. This is when they walked into view of our doorbell camera. I have evidence of them calling each other apes and wishing diseases on each other until my neighbour broke them up.
15 minutes later his mom rang our doorbel and started screaming at my son and my husband that my son wasn't allowed to talk about her being divorced. I have no idea what the situation with her family is so I'm not even sure she is divorced, but my son had clearly struck a nerve. We tried to tell her that my son had said these things out of emotions and that we in turn did not appreciate being called fat and dog killers. But there was no conversation possible. she kept screaming over us and making a scene. My husband then walked up towards her and told her to get off our property. That did not calm her down and she threatened to call the police. We went inside our house. She waited around for maybe 15 more minutes and drove off angrily. We haven't seen our neighbour, the kid or her today, but I'm afraid this has turned the relationship with our neighbour sour.
These are not isolated incidents, but are part of a long history of stuff. My son comes home crying at least a couple of times per month. I have gently suggested time and time again that there might be better friends out there for him. I try to encourage him to invite other kids over to our house, but he keeps going back to V and R because probably it's hard for him to make other friends.
I am having a hard time figuring out what to do next. Personally, I don't want my son to be involved with these kids anymore. These fights could be called innocent at one point, but I have the feeling that their friendship is turning more and more toxic and these fights are not so cute anymore. Plus after the incident with our neighbour, I'm just done. As an adult I just want to encourage him to go NC with these kids, but they're his friends, not mine.
I also feel like it may not be my place to force my child to give up these friendships. I have silently stood by for years hoping that they would at some point figure this out, or that my son would come to the conclusion that these are not kind kids to hang out with. Last year at my son's birthday party V kept making racist comments to my son's classmates, despite me telling him off time and time again and now that my son's birthday is coming up again I feel like we shouldn't be inviting these two boys anymore.
WIBTAH if I forced my son to stop seeing these boys or am I overreacting?