The Problem with 'Boys Will Be Boys'

[Matariki]

http://kateelliottsff.tumblr.com/post/51134366578/the-problem-with-boys-will-be-boys

For months, every morning when my daughter was in preschool, I watched her construct an elaborate castle out of blocks, colorful plastic discs, bits of rope, ribbons and feathers, only to have the same little boy gleefully destroy it within seconds of its completion.

No matter how many times he did it, his parents never swooped in BEFORE the morning’s live 3-D reenactment of “Invasion of AstroMonster.” This is what they’d say repeatedly:

“You know! Boys will be boys!”

“He’s just going through a phase!”

“He’s such a boy! He LOVES destroying things!”

“Oh my god! Girls and boys are SO different!”

“He. Just. Can’t. Help himself!”

more at the link

[Matariki]

1. Excellent blog post, worth reading the whole thing

[SummerSnow]

2. Awesome ...I read the whole thing.

[Blue_Tires]

3. FWIW...

I've seen that situation play out with the genders reversed a thousand times...

[bettyellen]

5. cool story, Blue

[Blue_Tires]

44. But would you read it again?

[nomorenomore08]

10. Which doesn't alter the main point.

Either way, the kid who thinks they can just knock down anybody's castle is in the wrong.

[Blue_Tires]

45. I get the writers main point

And despite some over-stretched generalizations, it has some valid parts...

[Buzz Clik]

12. Sorry, dude. That doesn't play here.

This is about males being bastards. Get on board or get out.

[nomorenomore08]

16. What's wrong with the OP?

All it says, to me, is we shouldn't let kids grow up to be entitled assholes.

[Buzz Clik]

18. Is that what it says?

Very poor summary.

I have learned when to keep out. I'm keeping out.

Carry on.

[nomorenomore08]

25. If you saw it differently then fine. I won't try to talk you out of it.

But honestly, reading the whole blog post, I didn't get from it what you apparently did.

[SomethingFishy]

17. +1

What is it with this place....

[bettyellen]

27. it's about how SOME people raise their kids to be bastards, and how others do not....

I guess you actually didn't read the link posted at all, huh?

[redstatebluegirl]

4. Excellent!

[BrotherIvan]

6. So simple and a great illustration

I'm tired of arguing with the full-grown equivalent of this boy. I'm tired of trying to illustrate that which he cannot comprehend, that his desires do not trump everyone else's. I am trying to talk with my friends who are raising boys, because that is the only hope I can see. And even my liberal, feminist-leaning female friends unknowingly fall into the "boys will be boys" way of thinking. They wait on their boys as well, cleaning up after them and coddling them far more than their daughters. It's so ingrained in all of us, that men must be serviced by the females in their vicinity, that often we don't realize what kind of men we are raising. I'm going to forward this on to them.

[smirkymonkey]

48. I am so glad that my siblings raise their boys to clean up

after themselves and to have respect for their mother and their sisters. My brothers and my sister's husband heartily support this and these young boys are turning out to be wonderful young men. They are still very young, but they show so much promise.

I think they are making a great contribution to the world by raising respectful, well rounded, helpfull little boys who have genuine respect for girls and women. I adore all these children and I applaud my siblings for raising such excellent children.

[BrotherIvan]

49. I applaud them as well!

And don't people know that men who have good interactions with women on the whole are much happier with better relationships in both work and family? It's a win win.

[smirkymonkey]

50. These boys will be considered "catches" some day.

They are respectful of girls/women, they are self sufficient and they are smart and will have good jobs. The girls will be good "catches" too because they have the same skills as the boys. They are all great kids. Very respectful, responsible and intelligent. I am very proud of all of them.

[Luminous Animal]

7. That was very good. Thank you.

[bettyellen]

8. Yup- this stuff starts early.

[undergroundpanther]

9. i had an experience like this

in kindergarten,I built a perfect pyramid out of purple blocks balancing one against another.Than a snotty boy came and knocked it over. I told him to not do it again or I'd knock his head off. I rebuilt it, and he knocked it over again and so I clobbered him. He was crying like a baby,as I reminded him he was warned he'd get hit if he knocked over my pyramid again so he knew he'd get punched..

This is where it gets weird.

We both got beaten,by the teacher . We both were sent to a corner. Meanwhile the teacher had been taking down the decorated bulletin boards, while I was in the corner watching some bugs outside,she made a crown from the purple border and put it on my head in front of the entire class.I dunno why she did that. People were fucked up in the 70's,
at least at the schools I attended.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

22. probably because she was glad you gave that boy what he deserved, and this was the only way she knew

to let you know how she felt. Maybe even because of past wrongs against her, where she didn't know how to defend herself...... seems very likely, to me.



I had a beautiful snow tunnel destroyed by the neighbor boys next door. Came onto our lawn just to destroy my tunnel! This was in the mid 60's or so. Of course, not a thing was done on my behalf. Oh, and I didn't know how to stand up for myself, like you did!!! You doin it right!

[s-cubed]

11. My son attended an all day preschool. He tended to be too aggressive. I have always been grateful

to the kind caring teachers who worked hard to teach him to temper this. Now he's grown with two beautiful preschool daughters, and he is incredibly good and patient with them. Yah teachers!

[Tuesday Afternoon]

13. excusing bad behavior no matter the gender should not be tolerated. preSCHOOL

is exactly the place to EDUCATE our young to be POSITIVE CONTRIBUTING MEMBERS of SOCIETY.

being in society means developing SOCIAL SKILLS.

MANNERS should know NO GENDER.

[defacto7]

26. hear, hear!

But those parents need to be interested in teaching those social skills and not worried that their child won't be their best friend anymore if they dare to be the adult. Unfortunately, there are too many parents who are afraid to be parents. There is nothing more frustrating to a child than a parent that can't be relied upon to set boundaries and keep them. Children never feel secure if they don't have boundaries and their bad behavior many times is part of acting out a fear of having no authority to protect them. Wimpy impatient parents, even with the best of intentions can actually cause fear, bad behavior and even cause their child to push them away. That's not exactly what they were hoping for.

[sigmasix]

35. my daughters have no patience for these behaviors

When they were younger my daughters would ask me why parents allow their children to misbehave (shopping malls, grocery stores and social gatherings) without punishment. They were never allowed to create mayhem through whiny, negative attention-seeking behavior- and they resent their contemporaries that do use this type of controlling behavior.

We taught them to excercise their empathic abilities and have respect for others. One cannot teach these principles to a child by being his/her friend. To be an effective parent one must be willing to be responsible for the tears of the child. Being a good parent means being able to say "NO" to the child and standing by the decision. No well adjusted child has friends for parents and no good parent has a friend for a child. Children that get everything they want, end up being adults that want everything they can't have.
plus there's the whole sociopathic personality dysfunction potential...

[defacto7]

36. That's what I say!

[daybranch]

14. The problem is

many parents won't be parents. My son in 2nd grade had a first grade girl that would hit him every day on the bus. He complained to the bus driver numerous times but the driver did nothing. My son came to me and told me that she kept hitting him. I asked what he had done to provoke her. He said nothing. I asked why he did not hit her back. He said that boys are not supposed to hit girls.
I told him that since the adult on the scene his female bus driver was doing nothing about it, and that girls have no special privilege to hit boys, just treat her like a boy who hits you.
Two days later I got a call that my son had hit a little girl on the bus and asking me to control him. Of course the note came from the bus driver who never felt it necessary when the little girl was the offender.
Now I could have went to the school principal and complained and prevented the little girl from getting hit, but would that have been better? I do not think so.
I personally think you should complain to the teacher and find out why this was happening. Likely the little boy was probably jealous of the attention she was getting and wanted some himself. This is wrong in any case but order in preschool is not the responsibility of parents and many many parents cannot see the poor behavior of their own children. This is really not a boy girl thing in preschool. It is just a rationalization that parents grabbed to cover their child. The parents probably the mother used a gender statement to cover their lack of parenting. Boys will be boys is in itself insulting to me as a man.

[Ms. Toad]

23. But I'll bet

that no one excused the little girl by saying, "girls will be girls."

And that is routinely the excuse given with boys who act this way. It doesn't make it right - or even the reason for the incident. But when it is said over and over by the way too many parents and teachers to excuse little boys acting badly, it becomes self reinforcing and some of these little boys turn into men who feel entitled to act badly.

[Heidi]

29. When I was growing up, little girls behaving aggressively toward other kids were called unladylike.

:barf:

[Ms. Toad]

33. Yep -

And the message was that the aggressive behavior was bad - the opposite of the message given by the "boys will be boys" excuses.

[Heidi]

34. And in this way, many girls (of my generation, anyway) learned

that there is no situation for which aggressive behavior by a female is an appropriate response.

[Behind the Aegis]

31. That is a huge problem. Little Johnnie/Suzie is just a perfect little angel!

While girls don't get the classic "boys will be boys", what I saw (and still see) is if girls are aggressive, especially to little boys, then the blame is placed on the little boys. Talk about mixed messages. When I told a teacher that a little girl kept taking my stuff, I was told not to be a "little fag." I was in third grade and didn't even know what that word meant. What was I supposed to do? Punch her? It was confusing. I should have told my parents, but I didn't.

[Incitatus]

15. His parents are going to be sorry

When he gets older and has not been taught how to behave properly. I think this will backfire on them and unfortunately, on society.

[Quantess]

37. I have a couple of examples in my own family

Two of my nephews. They were allowed to roam loose and cause damage in stores from an early age. It was only when they got older and more troublesome that their mom saw the need for good behavior, but by then it was harder to teach proper behavior out in stores.

Their mom viewed her boys as precious angels who could do no wrong (she still does). They were disrespectful and lazy slobs who didn't pick up after themselves. They were whipsmart children, but they didn't perform well in school when they got a little older, because they didn't want to do what teachers told them to do.

They are about 30 years old now, and they are two of the most worthless members of society I know! Their mother still caters to their needs. Their mom still cleans up after them!! She gave them a place to live, because they had no jobs. They seem to have no interest in getting a job, either.

One of them went to an expensive beer brewing school in Germany, paid for by mommy. He could get a job at a brewery but he chooses to grow pot instead and brew his own beer. I told him about a microbrew that was looking for a brewer. He said "I don't want to work for someone else because they'll just tell me what to do".

[burnodo]

39. Yes. He'll become President of the United States.

nt

[snot]

19. I don't understand why the girl's mom

didn't voice any objection to the boy's behavior to him or his parents.

[HiPointDem]

43. i don't understand why you're the only one who asked that question.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

20. I can hardly describe how ANGRY this kind of parenting makes me.

It's as if that little girl DOESN'T EVEN EXIST.





I will definitely read the whole blog post.

[Whisp]

21. back when my girl was little

we had a family we hung out with once in a while that had a boy about the same age.

The kids would play well enough together until the other parents piped in. If my girl was winning at cards or chinese checkers, they would have a stroke. No kidding. Yes. Then chomp in with cheers of 'beat her', and all that shit. I couldn't believe it. What assholes. Everything was a competition to them. Everything. If my girl went to a sport or anything like that, they would have to one up in some way or else degrade what she was doing (for example, she went into French Immersion when little and all they could say about that was bad. That she would suffer so much later in school which all turned out to be total bullshit, coming from bullshitters.)

Haven't seen them in many years. Thank Dog.

[DonCoquixote]

24. And here is the secret of America

America encourages men to be "strong and wrong' to quote president Clinton, a man who, despite the fact you would not trust your teenage daughter around him, made a good president. We desire the psychopath so we can sick him on other psychopaths.

[undergroundpanther]

30. I wish people would face up

to the fact sociopaths can't be cured or controlled and we would get the psychopaths outta here.I mean,why do people tolerate so much intolerable bullshit.

The banks financially abuse us,Bad bosses abuse,bad spouses abuse,movies are violent and often center on abuse,children are abused by adults and adults get abused by their own half grown kids.Men and women kids get raped in epidemic numbers,people are used,abused taken,lied to,etc.etc. on and on and on.

When will we be DONE tolerating psychopathy,authoritarians and narcissists?? Because these abusive pieces of shit are ruining this country,the world and our land base. People keep their noses to the grindstone,won't make waves,fear offending,etc.

Eventually we each will have to take responsibility and do what musty be done to take power away from those who abuse it, and deal with the psychopath problem that has festered for way too long in society with no consequences.

[defacto7]

28. I'd like to throw in a twist...

It's a light argument because I'm not set on this. But I think it used to be that men were expected to be strong and under control and women weak and subservient. In modern America, men are portrayed and expected to be stupid and subservient in entertainment media. That contradiction may be one reason there is such a male outbreak of over-dominant behavior. No one, men or women, want to be expected to be the stupid bunt of the joke, and for men, that's what's been portrayed in the children's media for the last 20 years or so... E.G. children are smarter than adults, children are more wise than adults, men are idiots and weak. Put together low self image, lack of boundaries, no parent you can rely on or trust, lack of education, stir in some testosterone and you just may end up with violence. Add a little abuse and you've got sociopathic behavior.

As for the little girl in this OP, it breaks my heart to think about the experience itself but It looks like she gained some resilience from it and did not learn revenge. The first boy? That breaks my heart in a different way because he has no real parent to rely on... just big buddies, and that can be very tragic.

[JVS]

32. When I was a toddler I would knock down my brother's block buildings.

He's 2.5 years older than me, so this was when I was around 2. Eventually he learned that if he had me helping him build stuff, I wouldn't knock it down. I still maintain that part of the nature of building with blocks is that it is transitory, not unlike sandcastles.

[SheilaT]

38. This is a complicated problem, but I do think that the "boys will be boys" meme

is incredibly destructive.

It says, basically, that destructive behavior on the part of boys is okay, because after all, they're only being boys. It's an acceptance of male bullying which you don't even want to get me started on.

I'm a female. I have three brothers and two sisters. I also have two sons, now grown. When I was growing up, in the 1950's, I was constantly enraged at the gender roles that were acceptable, even though I didn't have the vocabulary to argue against such things. I recall being very disturbed that I was not allowed to play with the construction toys that my brothers could play with. I recall being infused with the notion that girls were somehow less worthy, even though I had a deep feeling that it wasn't true, that I was as good as my brothers, as the boys in my class. But I didn't really have the vocabulary to argue with those ideas.

In high school, I had the amazing good fortune to have a math teacher who clearly thought the girls were as capable as the boys at math. That helped me a lot.

Eventually I had two sons. They are grown now. For what it's worth I never gave them toy guns to play with, and when my sister gave them toy guns for Christmas, I put them up on a shelf and eventually threw them away. It is NOT built into young males that they will create guns to play with. Really.

As parents we have immense control over how our children will grow up. Yes, they come into this world with their own personalities and perhaps their own agendas, but we have enormous control over the circumstances of their lives. It is up to us how much TV they watch. Or if they watch TV at all. Or if they do watch, exactly what programs they watch. Those TVs have an on and off switch. Yes, they do. We control the channels.

And no matter what we let them watch, we can also discuss a lot of thing with them. "That is not acceptable behavior" was one of my stock phrases when my boys were young.

Oh, and for what it's worth: I was so outspoken about what I'd let my kids watch, that whenever either of them was at a friend's house, I'd usually get a call from the mom if they were going to let the kids watch a movie. "It's a PG13" I'd be told when my kid was 10 or 12. "Is that ok?" And even though in my house I would not let my kid watch a PG13 movie at that age, I figured it was not up to me to police what other families did, so I ALWAYS said, that's okay. I knew that the occasional movie above their age level wouldn't hurt them, and this way they got to taste the forbidden fruit. More importantly, I wasn't telling other moms how to run their lives, or what their kids could watch.

What I do know is that in the end my children benefited Most of the time they were restricted in what they saw. But they did get to break out from my restrictions on occasion, which certainly didn't hurt them and probably made them feel they were getting away with something.

In the long run, I supported what I think of as the right standards.

"Boys will be boys" is a cop-out for not making the young males treat others properly.

[Posteritatis]

40. I'd say not even an acceptance of that, but actually an encouragement of it

"Aha! This is how I am supposed to be!"

[SheilaT]

46. Of course!

I should have recognized that aspect also.

Tolerance or encouragement, either way it's a very bad thing.

[Posteritatis]

47. Absolutely. (nt)

[sibelian]

41. Yes, it's a mess.

And, also, ultimately destructive for the boys brought up under this idea. Someone with no respect for other people can't ever really learn any respect for himself.

[HappyMe]

42. Ignorant, bullying behavior

knows no gender.

[Just Saying]

51. While I think the genders could be reversed,

The OP makes several good points.

One is clearly that some parents don't teach their children to respect others.

But another point is that boys are sometimes excused from aggressive behavior due to their gender in much the same way that a young girl might be encouraged to "act like a lady" (translation=be quiet, don't be rough or get dirty etc.)

And no, it's not about all men being bastards, but societal expectations are (still!) different between the genders. If your don't believe it, just look for the thread with the poll about women in the workplace.

For the record I'm certainly not anti-men since I'm married to one and raising 2 more hopefully to be respectful members of society.