If you made the decision to intentionally distance yourself from a friend, were you honest about it or did you decide to “ghost” them? What were your reasons?

I love my friend. She is an amazing selfless person and has helped us so much since we moved to this area 3.5 years ago. Her 4 year old son is my 4yo sons best friend and they get along great. But her other son (9) has always had behavioral issues and they have been getting worse. Whenever we get together he is mean to our son picking on him, bossing him around and even physically harming him. He’s also extremely rude to adults and has no respect for other people’s property or personal space. Now, my son also has behavioral issues and even goes to a special needs school among other things so I’m certainly more sympathetic to this than the average person. But her sons behaviors have been getting so bad that it’s been very upsetting for our son and ontop of that it’s clear that my friend doesn’t believe in discipline so she literally ignores him completely as he destroys our property and tortures our son. It’s gone on for too long now but we’ve finally decided to maybe not end the friendship completely but at least never allow her son near our son. It will soon become obvious what we’re doing and I’m sure our 4 yo’s relationship will suffer as a result.

Now I’m wondering.. should I tell her our plan? Explain our reasons why? I would obviously leave out any judgy comments about her parenting style and keep it to the facts about how upset the interactions make our son. But she is always complaining about people telling her she needs to use discipline and I’m afraid she will jump to this conclusion and get mad. Will it do more harm than good? What have you all done in similar situations?