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 morningâs live 3-D reenactment of âInvasion of AstroMonster.â This is what theyâd say repeatedly:
âYou know! Boys will be boys!âÂ
âHeâs just going through a phase!â
âHeâs such a boy! He LOVES destroying things!â
âOh my god! Girls and boys are SO different!â
âHe. Just. Canât. Help himself!â
I tried to teach my daughter how to stop this from happening. She asked him politely not to do it. We talked about some things she might do. She moved where she built. She stood in his way. She built a stronger foundation to the castle, so that, if he did get to it, she wouldnât have to rebuild the whole thing. In the meantime, I imagine his parents thinking, âWhat red-blooded boy wouldnât knock it down?â
She built a beautiful, glittery castle in a public space.
He just couldnât control himself and, being a boy, had violent inclinations.
She had to keep her building safe.
Her consent didnât matter. Besides, itâs not like she made a big fuss when he knocked it down. It wasnât a âlegitimateâ knocking over if she didnât throw a tantrum.
His desire â for power, destruction, control, whatever- - was understandable.
Maybe she âshouldnât have gone to preschoolâ at all. OR, better if she just kept her building activities to home.
I know itâs a lurid metaphor, but I taught my daughter the preschool block precursor of donât âget rapedâ and this child, Boy #1, did not learn the preschool equivalent of âdonât rape.â
Not once did his parents talk to him about invading another personâs space and claiming for his own purposes something that was not his to claim. Respect for her and her work and words was not something he was learning.  How much of the boyâs behavior in coming years would be excused in these ways, be calibrated to meet these expectations and enforce the ârulesâ his parents kept repeating?
There was another boy who, similarly, decided to knock down her castle one day. When he did it his mother took him in hand, explained to him that it was not his to destroy, asked him how he thought my daughter felt after working so hard on her building and walked over with him so he could apologize. That probably wasnât much fun for him, but he did not do it again.
There was a third child. He was really smart. He asked if he could knock her building down. She, beneficent ruler of all pre-circle-time castle construction, said yes⊠but only after she was done building it and said it was OK. They worked out a plan together and eventually he started building things with her and they would both knock the thing down with unadulterated joy. You canât make this stuff up.
Take each of these three boys and consider what he might do when heâs older, say, at college, drunk at a party, mad at an ex-girlfriend who rebuffs him and uses words that she expects will be meaningful and respecte, âNo, I donât want to. Stop. Leave.â
The âoverarching attitudinal characteristicâ of abusive men is entitlement
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