Austin has identified the main problem. My DS8 has nothing in common with these kids. The 11-year old likes violent video games (no, really?) which I won't let my son watch. The younger kids think he is cool because he can view things that are forbidden to them. So he can keep them hooked because he shares info with them that they can't get any other place. They are starting to talk about alcohol and how cool it is to be drunk. So if my son does play with them, he starts acting out what I would call inappropriate things with his lego figures.
We are really quite different from the average family around here, in that we don't let him watch a lot of tv and we don't have a game boy or WII. I have often worried that we are depriving him of some basic social connection, and would love to ask what other people think of this. We prefer to spend our time reading books and using your imagination. But in this world, that can isolate you by making you stand out as different. He got labeled as "weird" and "crazy" in second grade because the other kids were playing Pokemon on the playground. My DS loves collecting the cards and knows all about the characters. But he hasn't watched any of the tv shows. These kids wanted to act out the tv shows exactly, and whenever my son had an idea about something cool he could add using his imagination, then the game would stop and they would call him names and tell him to leave. Sigh.
Once DS(then 7) was up in a tree looping climbing rope through all the branches and having a ball when one of the next door kids came over (they are the same age). My son excitedly asked the other boy to come on up on his spaceship, and that he was about to blast off to another planet. The ropes were the electricity lines that he was plugging in to power his ship, and so he told the boy to be careful not to touch them when he was climbing up. The boy stood there looking confused. My son stopped and explained again that he was welcome to come up and play and that maybe they could go off and have a grand adventure exploring space and finding some evil jedi to conquer. The boy continued to stare. After about ten minutes, the neighbor boy finally said, "Oh, you are using your imagination!".
Needless to say, they are not the best match for playmates. They (twin boys) have been held back a year and my son has advanced a year. The parents on the block actually view my son as the weird one (because he is up in trees talking to himself about space adventures!) and would prefer to have their kids play with the 11-year old who acts out his first-person-shooter games in the front yard. They view DS8's vivid imagination (you know, the one you get from turning off the tube and reading books occasionally...) as a sign of a mental disability. They have actually told their kids that they don't trust DS8 and not to play with him.
How do you find kids that are similar to your kid when your kid is one in 10,000+? Does anyone else have trouble finding "normal" kids for their kids to play with?
