why is it hard to like other people’s boy children

A) I think you are seriously underestimating the damage that girls and women do because it's not generally physical.
B) I feel like a lot of this is the rose tinted glasses of having older children who are seemingly pretty compliant. I have a son and daughter who are very close in age. Both frequently interrupt (and have to be reminded not to), both sometimes don't listen, both have to be reminded that they are expected to help.
C) I do think societal expectations of girls and boys are very different and we should do what we can to counter those. That doesn't seem to be the focus of your OP, but I'm glad you've pivoted from a rather unpleasant rant to a more reasonable argument.

I don’t have to ask. It’s clear. It’s misogyny. Plenty of women fall foul of this. You’re a misogynist even if your intentions are not bad

This is ridiculous. I have both genders, and I have both neices and nephews, they all have different personalities because they are individuals! They are all unique characters and I love them all. For what its worth, I know little boys who are quiet, thoughtful and very kind and little girls who are much more boisterous. I adore my sisters daughters but she would tell you herself, they really were extremely difficult as teenagers and her son was always relatively easy. Some kids are parented badly and its irrelevant if they are boys or girls. 🤷‍♀️

Because you’ve got no sons? That was in the original post.

When my oldest ds was a newly walking toddler I thought the three-year olds at playgroup were absolute thugs. Clearly feral, badly parented and just nasty. Obviously looking back I can see how ludicrous that was, I was just feeling very protective of my child. I hadn't ever had a three-year old then, and couldn't see them as anything other than overgrown and dangerous.

I feel like there's a bit of similar bias going on here because you can see the danger in men (as can I), but it's not balanced out by you also seeing boys as actual children who started out as babies, because as you say yourself you've so little experience of them and none of your own. In reality boys are both potential adult men being socialised into patriarchal attitudes, who could later be dangerous, and children with their own three-dimensional personalities and vulnerabilities.

Any parent can look at their own child through rose-tinted glasses and see them as doing no wrong (see also: parents of mean girls who don't believe that their daughter can possibly be a bully). Yes, a man brought up that way can be more physically dangerous to others than a girl brought up that way (although bullying can drive other girls to suicidality). But why do you think some of the posters above do things like talk about consent with their sons? Because they know the patriarchal society we're all living with, and they try to push back against that. You've never been in conversations with mothers of boys who worry about all this stuff so you seem to have decided they don't exist, but they do.

Interesting thread!

I think a lot of people are posting individual experiences with one or two kids, which is missing the point about the wider, population trends.

I think from a very young age, boys are socialised into being loud, rude and aggressive. Of course, some boys don't have a temperament that lends itself towards that, but parenting the behaviours that result from this kind of expectation (eg from other children at nursery) is hard work and frustrating.

To give my own anecdata, my nearly 4yo is full of rude names, particularly for me not DH, and deliberately does stuff badly so that you do it for him (personal care, tidying, cleaning). And yes it is deliberate. And parenting that hundreds of times a week is so draining.

Exactly!

Not all men…but way too many! If anyone missed this CNN article have a read - an online ‘academy’ received 62 million views in one month...

www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html

Patriarchal attitudes do get passed down via parenting but they also exist and can be picked up beyond parents - I personally found primary schools shocking for gender sterotypes and enforcing them.

But I don't think it's fair to blame individual boys for wider societal issues - or to blame mothers for ones who do turn bad.

Frankly it sounds like you have quite a few family members you don't actually like - fair enough - but then you are finding fault with their parenting or them and then balming wider and longer standing societal issues on those people.

We've raised a polite well manner boy who just turned 19- who teachers and group leaders all comment on and say that - frankly I think that the bare minimum to expect - but it's not a lone feat most of his mates and DDs mates who are male are lovely to be round.

How often does your DH have your SS OP?

Having had wonderful now professional young sons I naturally feel more protective of boys & it has continued now I have a much loved & adored grandaughter. Please don't ask,it's just the way I've always felt & still do at family gatherings etc

Disagree. Not 24 hours ago a delicate little perfect girl flower yanked my 4 year old out of his soft play corner, hurting him, because she "only wanted girls in there". My little boy is full of kindness and fiercely clever and curious about the world. I'm sure lots of little girls are too and lots are annoying, whiny and never clean up after themselves. Your post is 🤮

It's one thing to start a thread or debate about how patriarchal attitudes are passed down through parenting - it definitely happens. But "why is it hard to like other people’s boy children" is just goady fuckery.

From your recent posts OP, it sounds like you're probably quite susceptible to confirmation bias about boys, because you've found a pattern and narrative you like based on a statistical sample of three boys and two sets of parents (your dss's mum and your own family) who you've identified as doing something wrong.

Writing off all boys with a massive generalisation is so enormously unhelpful and blind. Have you never spoken to any mothers of boys who work hard to counter society's socialisation of boys? Is it that you don't believe we exist? What about fathers of boys who are also not like your stereotypes and also work hard to bring up boys well?

You seem to have this incredibly narrow idea of what must be going on for society to have ended up the way it is, or it seems like that's all you want to see.

If you genuinely wanted to have a discussion about all the overt and insidious ways in which socialisation into patriarchal attitudes happens right from birth, then starting off with a sweeping general statement about other people's boy children being hard to like was blindingly obviously not the way to go.

Had you been genuinely interested in that discussion, you might have learned a lot from the experiences of parents of boys, especially mothers, especially feminist mothers. But you seem to have decided they have nothing to offer.

It's amazing how somehow all the boys seem to have been given to the bad parents and all the girls to the good parents. Or just possibly it's not that simple.

Love it when people just bitch at the OP with nothing useful to add.

The op clearly has a very fixed opinion of boys despite not having her own boy/boys.
We all pretty much know about the statistics she gives us but we also know that the vast majority of our boys aren't likely to be in those statistics.
It really is a shame that she has this extremely blinkered view , i hope her daughters are lesbians to save them from our dreadful boys !
I still think her thread was intended to goad .

I regularly see really poor behaviour from boys. Today I saw a 7 year old boy being disrespectful and violent to his mother (deliberately stepping on her toes despite her saying it hurts and stop it).

I could list so many more. There’s only a handful of boys I think are actually lovely, and will grow into decent men. Very few will say thank you if you hold a door open for them, girls do this every time.

I’ve also had a boy stand up to give his seat to my daughter at a busy event, who he didn’t know. Both his parents praised him, so was clearly interested in raising a gentleman. I can see many mothers saying ‘why did you give your seat to that girl’ etc. I think a lot is parenting issues. This dad was already standing so clearly leading by example. Boys need good role models.

Boys aren’t all bad. But there are very few I would be shocked to hear had done something awful….. it’s definitely a huge problem.

I'm very clear with my son that it's not OK to continue boring someone with your chosen topic of conversation (usually football/sport/video game) when they are Not Interested.

I think it's really important that parents don't just patiently listen to them waffle on about fortnite or whatever, it gives them an unrealistic idea that people are interested/ don't mind it when actually lots of people don't want to hear about their chosen topic whether that's some ridiculous roblox game, football, or pokemon or whatever. I nip it in the bud early on by cutting them off and reminding them they know I don't play that game/ watch that sport and am not interested and have told them this before so why are they trying to talk to me about this again?!

At this age I think girls just tend to be a bit more mature as puberty hits girls earlier on average.