A child's heart yearns for respect.

A child's heart yearns for respect. Here is my sixth-grade son's composition from elementary school.

The Moment That Touched Me

Two weeks ago, I accidentally sprained my ankle while playing football. It was really painful at first, but then my mom took me to the hospital and the doctor said it wasn't a big deal. After that, the doctor put a stabilizer on my foot and told me not to do any strenuous exercise.

The next day, when I came to school, I could only move carefully during break time. The second period in the afternoon was my favorite physical education class. After the in-class lesson was over, the teacher let us have free choice of activities. Football, basketball, badminton, everyone formed groups and picked their favorite sport. I was left on the sidelines watching my classmates doing activities on the playground, feeling really envious and gloom. Later on, I couldn't hold back and walked up to several students playing basketball, asking if I could join them. They looked at me and saw my foot, showing hesitation. I understood they were worried about hurting my foot again and getting criticized by the teacher. Just then, several familiar voices came from behind me: "Do you want to play together?" I turned around and saw a few of my best friends in the class: Xuewei Luo, Ruiyang Cao, and Liyao Zhao. They invited me to play badminton together. In that moment, I was touched. They took turns playing with me. During the game, even though I couldn't run or jump, I played really poorly. But they didn't have any complaints and instead kept playing with me patiently until class was over. During the game, my opponents tried as much as possible to hit the birdie closer to me, so I didn't have to make big movements or use too much strength to catch it. They are really a group of friends worth making, they could tell what difficulties I was going through and were there for me when I needed them. What touched me more was that, regardless of how poorly I played, they still treated me like a normal opponent. Sometimes, being viewed as a fair competitor is the biggest respect one can receive. After playing badminton, they accompanied me back to the classroom at a slow pace, pouring me water and talking with me.

I am extremely grateful to these good friends, as they helped me come out of the pain!