To think that the way people treat male toddlers....

[Yellowcrocodile]

Is what leads to male entitlement in society?

Name changed for this as potentially identifying.

So I have a 2 year old DD and am currently pregnant with a boy.

Spent the morning at a playgroup in a naice area. I’ve come home feeling furious by the behaviour of some of the children and their parents. Basically there were a few boys 3+ who absolutely ran riot, screaming, running, shouting, snatching and hitting, and generally causing chaos. Their parents just smiled indulgently, and made comments like ‘boys have so much more energy’. None of them told their children off, apologised to anyone or acknowledged that their children were badly misbehaving.

It’s like this every fucking week. My daughter has her naughty moments too, snatches, tantrums etc, but as soon as she starts I tell her off (calmly), explain why she can’t do xyz, and say we are leaving if she carries on. She generally responds and behaves herself, and I’m very embarrassed if she doesn’t, as I have high expectations of her. Almost all of the other girls and half of the boys are the same, not perfect little angels but parented appropriatley and respond to boundaries.

It’s making me worried that when I have my son:
a. He’ll be a horrible little shit
b. I’m turn into one of the terrible parents who attribute his poor behaviour to ‘being boisterous’ or ‘naturally having more energy’

These children are never told off, and their sense of entitlement is growing by the day. This is probably hormones talking, but I can completely see how some men end up not doing any housework, feeling entitled to the best of everything, and go around raping and murdering people, as they are told from an early age that any behaviour is fine as they ‘have more energy’ and they just aren’t held to normal standards of behaviour.

Also, they all seem to be call very boring middle class names like william, Samuel and Benjamin, don’t know what that’s about? The children with names that would raise a mumsnet eyebrow are much better behaved.

So, AIBU to blame toxic masculinity and male entitlement on the tolerance we have for poor behaviour from boys in childhood?!

Or are hormones making me crazy...

I’m determined not to treat my son any differently to my daughter for both of their sakes, but feel really sad about the society they will both be growing up in

Sorry! Behaviour is predetermined due to gender.

I have one DS, who is now almost 19. He has been the baby in the class, the "stupid one", and much more. He's been to four schools for secondary, across all the boundaries of age, ability and fee paying. He's learned to stop and watch people, and file what he sees. His social skills/antennae are refined by all this. But he was never the playground top dog. He chose his fights, for kudos, mostly....

Boys seem to have more need to know where they fit in the pecking order than girls, while they are young.

I don’t agree , my sons are full of energy but less than most of the girls around their age . My son was kicked at school for weeks by a girl who was a year younger than her and she gets away with most of it because she can easily change her personality in front of authority . There’s another friends daughter who ripped my sons clothes because it was brighter than hers and she said she wanted her clothes to be brightest . So it depends from child to child and how their parents raise them

@DieAntword
Talent? You think "talent" is "male biased"?
I mean that seems absurd, you really feel as a woman that the word "talent" puts you off doing something because it feels reserved for men? That is utterly bizarre to me.

Girls as young as 6 start thinking so.

[...] the results reveal that girls of five years old are just as likely as boys to associate brilliance with their own gender. However, for those aged six and seven, girls were less likely than boys to make the association: among six year olds, boys chose people of their own gender as “really, really smart” 65% of the time while girls only selected their gender as brilliant 48% of the time.
The study then explored which gender was expected by children to do better academically at school. The team found that while girls aged five to seven were more likely than boys to associate their own gender with good grades, they did not link such achievements to brilliance.

www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jan/26/girls-believe-brilliance-is-a-male-trait-research-into-gender-stereotypes-shows

And yes, parents saying "boys will be boys" is how it starts.

This continues into adolescence, by which time some boys are so used to doing whatever they like, they are unlikely to respond to any sort of rebuke. The parents then realise they've left it too late and expect a classroom teacher with 30 other kids to deal with, to sort out their mess but interfere when you try and impose any sort of discipline on their little William or Benjamin. Of course say they they like the idea of strong discipline and choose a school based on that, but what they really mean is that it should only be applied to other people's children. Then they wonder why teacher retention is such an issue.

I completely agree op.

I know someone who has two toddler sons, and whilst I believe she is a good parent, she frequently defends their naughty behaviour by making sweeping statements about ‘all boys do x...’ and ‘this is what boys are like.’
I also hate the ‘toughening’ of boys of toddler age that I frequently witness too. A boy who falls over is told to get up, stop crying, and carry on. Girls on the other hand are typically cuddled and re-assured.

Boys get labelled (by other parents) as horrible little shits, girls as bossy little madams. It's the parents who need to be condemned not the children.

die I'm sorry the study didn't make sense to you.

I think the most obvious study was number 3. Adverts for the same job were written using different descriptive words, one with words that carry a feminine bias and one with words that carry a male bias. They then showed that women would preferentially engage with the feminine description and men with the male.

What this shows is that certain words are considered more welcoming/encouraging by women than by men and other words have the opposite.

The words they tested this on were things like determined, superior, individual on the male side and committed, sympathetic on the female.

The word sets appear to have been selected on the basis of previous studies that determined which words have this effect. The current study reproves the point though. If these words didn't signal belonging/identification in one group more than the other than the result would not be seen.

So if you put 'superior' in a job advert (or leadership or confident) then on average you will put women off applying and encourage men...because on average, men identify with these labels, and on average women don't.

My comment about talent was that again, men identify more readily on average with being 'talented' than women. Women tend to identify more readily on average with being 'hard working'.

So if you have an academic subject that is further (wrongly) associated with needing more in the way of talent than hard work (eg. physics in the UK...but other subjects elsewhere) then you will transfer your gender bias around talent onto that subject. In a country that still has the bias that talent is male biased while hard work is female biased, but no similar bias for the subject of physics, then you don't see bias in the subject even though the gender biases may be worse over all.

Obviously I am not saying that men ARE more talented and women ARE more hardworking. That's bollocks...even on average. But societal perception biases do lean that way. Ask someone to picture a brilliant person in any field and they likely come back with a male mental picture. Similarly it is not at all the case that you need 'talent', 'flair' or 'brilliance' to become a scientist any more than you need these things in any field. You can get just as far in science with hard work as you can in history, or literature. But if you stop someone in the street and ask why they didn't go further with maths/science than GCSE and I will bet you solid money they will say they didn't have sufficient ability/skill for it....while asking the same question as to why people didn't go further with history than GCSE and they will say it didn't interest them enough.

nice link tilda - much better than my essay!

I think children need to run around and be noisy somewhere- if not at a playgroup or park then where?

YANBU for suggesting that toddlers should be told off when they snatch or hit. YABU for suggesting that they should be prevented from running around and shouting in a playgroup, for wondering if your son might turn out to be 'a horrible little shit', and for making the gigantic leap from 'never being told off' to 'going around raping and murdering people'.

Hmmm I am a mum of boys.
Also a feminist.
I have to say I think they are different. They don't behave in the same way as girls do.
I expect them to be kind and not hurt anyone. They don't like rough kids at school. They are good kids.
But they have sooo much energy and they need to run it off.
My friend's have girls who will just sit there and do colouring in or read for ages. My boys are just bouncy. Like puppies. I have not tried to make them like this it's just how they are.

Don't think what you feel is a general case. There are some awfully boisterous girls who can be quite wicked to one another even at playgroup/nursery age. The parents though should be involved in controlling aggressive behaviour from a young age but there is the sector that believes their child can do no wrong and is only displaying their natural personality. (I can think of some other words to describe this but would be deleted.) A lot of parents just cannot be bothered with the hassle of controlling their children, see it nearly every time I visit a supermarket or store, kids just doing their own thing anywhere the choose. Today it was 9/10 year old girls racing up and down the aisle on rollerblades. Adults not caring a jot about who they were basically mowing down, of course they were just having some fun!
Unfortunately its the way people behave now and you daren't criticise.
Try another playgroup where adults actually get off their behinds and deal with their little cherubs.

I've found it the total opposite actually ( I have boys and a girl). Girls get away with everything and especially if there is a boy nearby to blame. By the time they are school age it is worse - darling princess girls (who will sit still and do what they are asked) and naughty boys just about sums up my experience of primary school.
My children are really 'good' if you like but the way some active and curious boys are treated is shocking - we have to start giving boys the credit they deserve and not label an adventurous nature as 'naughty' or challenging.

It’s your hormones. You can’t paint all parents of boys with the same brush. There are three naughty kids at your playgroup. It doesn’t matter if they’re boys or girls—it’s bad parenting technique letting them run riot. Suggesting that parents not setting boundaries leads to boys being entitled rapists is an insult.

I have 4 boys and 1 girl. They are different but they also know boundaries. I have to say at home my daughter is the ring leader when it comes to being naughty, she’s the youngest and often torments the boys. In a play area (rather than a play group) she runs around, screams and shouts just as much as the boys also climbs and hangs off things like a monkey. In a play group situation she sits quietly and shyly while the boys jump around like loonies.

Boys and girls have different personality traits, but they should all know boundaries and what you describe is bad parenting they just happen to be boys.

My dd has perfected her ‘it wasn’t me’ face for her daddy and he falls for it every time, I have to step in and point out the evidence!!

Girls are being brought up to be entitled if anything. To expect men to run around after and protect them!

Maths is a weird one. I’d say the problem with it is precisely it takes hard work, and in school a lot of boring tedious work. People give up on it because the impression they get of it is sitting in one place doing sums and having to be completely accurate (no scope for a leisurely skim and summary of the general concept). That said I had a god awful maths teacher and only put in any effort at all because my main purpose at school was to show off how clever I was. I wish we’d had some conceptual stuff like category theory or something in school. Maybe if there was more of that and less hyperfocused busy work girls would be more interested (interested enough to put up with the boring bits).

Maybe though as someone who willingly did computer science (in the hundreds of people on my course there were 4 other girls and one FtM transsexual as the total representation of femininity) and not for a political reason (I only mention because that seemed to be the primary motivation of all other non-Asian girls) I’m probably such an outlier I’d never understand.

I guess one thing that gets my back up is a lot of the things aimed at making things like compsci more attractive to girls tend to make it less attractive to me. It almost feels like taking something I love away from me. And then there’s my husband who absolutely hates the macho culture in the industry (it’s a kind of nerdy machismo though where people measure their dicks by how clever they are) because he is deeply insecure and finds it intimidating even though he is just as smart as the rest of them and could hold his own fine if he wanted to play their games (though I agree he shouldn’t and just get on with his work).

YABU!!
I have 2 boys, my eldest DS used to be like this but I used to tell him to calm down! If he hit he was told off. What you’re seeing is not ‘boys being boys’ but shit parenting IMO.

As for the children’s ‘boring’ names.. is that really anything to do with your point?! Seriously 🙄 get over yourself

Yanbu. My daughter had her bottom slapped by a bit at school. They are in year 1. I'm still cross with myself that I didn't go and speak to the school.

I also hate the ‘toughening’ of boys of toddler age that I frequently witness too. A boy who falls over is told to get up, stop crying, and carry on. Girls on the other hand are typically cuddled and re-assured.*

I was given the impression the best way to deal with toddler falls (regardless of sex) was to completely ignore it and offer reassurance only if requested (because most of the time if you don’t react they’ll probably just get back up and keep playing).

Yanbu. My daughter had her bottom slapped by a bit at school. They are in year 1. I'm still cross with myself that I didn't go and speak to the school.

How is this related to the OP. You’re taking about one boy not boys. My son has been hit and thrown on the ground by a girl in reception class this year and cut open his head. I don’t think her mum was even informed and I am very disappointed with school. That’s an issue with one child who happens to be a girl.