Neighborhood Kids

There are many kids around here who like to come over to visit us. The most prominent is Keiven. He's really sweet, and we really like him; sometimes, though, he's hard to get to go home when it's time for us to do some work or eat dinner. He's getting better at that, though. Sometimes he brings with him Kumari or Naya, who are both sweet. The neighborhood kid who is trouble is 10-year-old Terrence. To a degree, Terrence is just rude. He has his sweet streaks, but he also has his bad streaks. Saturday night he came over, and we went outside to hang out with him. He likes to climb all over everyone. We repeatedly told him that he has to ask before he can just jump on someone, but he continued to do it. He started yelling across the street at older men trying to pick a fight. At one point he became scared and came to hid just inside our door as some guy whom he had antagonized walked by on the other side of the street. We told him that we needed to go do homework, and so we locked him out. He knocked at the door for about two minutes, and then began knocking at the window. I walked toward the window and heard him ask someone to help him break into his house because he locked himself out, and then I saw him breaking off pieces of our window. It was the plastic outside storm window, and there was already a crack in it, but he was pulling out pieces of the window. Tara and I tried to take him home, but we didn't know where he lived. We got to one door, and he demanded we give him his bike back. So I did, and he took off back for the apartment. By the time Tara and I got back, Graham was out on the stoop with him, and there was another piece missing from the window. Graham had him under control, but as we walked in, Terrence was flaunting the piece of window at me, trying to get me to react. Fortunately, Graham was taking care of him, which was the best thing for the situation. She got him to calm down and eventually took him home with Chris Hale when he showed up to visit. Some of the neighbors were really mad and want us to not allow Terrence to hang around anymore. We disagree, although we're not exactly sure how to handle the situation. It's very obvious that Terrence just wants attention, even if it's just negative attention. We can't have him treating us this way, but we can't just leave him to continue getting in trouble. I feel really bad for him. I'm frustrated with him, but I also feel really bad for him. He clearly doesn't get a lot of attention, and so he misbehaves in an attempt to get attention. We just have to figure out how to curb his behavior so that he can get positive attention from us.