Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems! (On failing to properly socialize our young men.)

I have a cottage on a lake about an hour outside of town. I go there to escape the noise, the heat, the bustle of the city. It is on a northern lake, and in the mornings and evenings the whole area echoes with the peaceful calls of loons. On warm days I can watch bald eagles and osprey soar on the breeze as they scan the water looking for their next meal. In the afternoon the wind often comes up, and at night I fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves gently lapping the beach. It is a little bit of Canadian heaven.

So it was with immense irritation that I began to have run-ins with the raucous teenage boys whose family often spends weekends a little bit further down the cove. Those boys are hard on the head. And they are hard on the environment, too! It seems that for them every form of outdoor recreation requires a loud, internal combustion engine revving at excessive speed. Many days they get started by carving up the placid surface of the lake with their noisy, smoke-spewing, stinking jetskis. After lunch they reemerge on their all-terrain vehicles and go flying down the dirt roads that skirt the lake. Even more noise. More smoke. More stink. And now dust, as well!

Mowing down goslings! One day I looked up in horror to see the three teenage boys whooping with glee as they repeatedly plowed a jetski through two families of Canada geese that had been peacefully swimming in the lake. The baby geese were strewn far and wide as the adult geese honked loudly in terror. Never have I run so fast or yelled so loud as I did that day while sprinting down to the beach to put an end to the brutal scene. The boys on the jestki heard my roars even over the roar of their own engine, and they immediately pulled further out into the lake – far away from me and the frantic geese.

Now, I like to think of myself as someone who tries to resolve issues calmly, respectfully, and creatively. But in this instance there was simply no time. The meaningless torture of helpless animals needed to be stopped – immediately! And I did bring it to a stop through screaming at the tormenters. After the thugs fled, the adult geese were able to collect their young and head for safety – far, far away from any teenage boys.

From their position further offshore, the boys made obscene gestures at me before speeding off.

“Boys will be boys.” As I related this horrible experience to several neighbors (and apologized for my own voluminous response), I found out that over the years pretty much everyone else in the community had also confronted these young men on their atrocious behavior (which included leaving garbage all over the beach, screaming down the road on their ATVs at dangerously high speeds, and periodically exploding loud fire crackers at 2 o’clock in the morning on the roof of a nearby house where an old woman lives alone – thereby scaring the hell out of her.) Not only had all my neighbors confronted these boys, they had also addressed these issues with the boys’ parents as well – only to get nowhere. The parents’ response was always to say: “What is your problem? Those boys are just having fun!”

So the boys had parental license to continue with their asinine behavior. And they had their parents’ resources as well. All of those “toys” the boys were riding on cost a fortune!

A few weeks after the episode with the geese, a police car passed through the area. “If those boys give you any trouble,” the police officer said, apparently quite familiar with this family, “You call us. We’re not going to tolerate their bad behavior anymore.” So at last someone was going to step in! If their parents were not going to place any limits on these boys’ behavior, then the law would!

But thinking about this option brought me only limited relief. The sort of mischief that the boys were involved in typically carries only very light penalties. And I was concerned about possible retaliation if I reported the kids to the cops. So for a while every time I went to the lake I looked to see if those kids were at their cottage. And whether or not they were there often meant the difference between a pleasant weekend or one that was filled with equal parts tension, ATV dust, and foul jetski exhaust.

But this year things are peaceful (at least for me). This year things are suddenly different. The boys are still around, but everything is much quieter. For one thing, the boys are now old enough to drive. Each now seems to have his own car (no doubt purchased for them by their parents) so they are not “stuck” at the lake with nothing better to do than to terrorize the neighbors (human and wildlife). And something else seems to be occupying the boys’ attention as well: girls. When the boys are around, there seem to be a number of girl friends/girlfriends with them. And while the boys can sometimes still be a little loud, they seem far more interested in impressing the girls than in being a pain the ass to everyone else.

“It’s great!” I find myself thinking about this new situation. “It’s so peaceful!” But then I realize that it is probably only great (and peaceful) for me. And the geese. And that old woman they are no longer harassing in the night. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel that it is only a matter of time before the young men’s antisocial behavior will be directed at those young women who now accompany them. I can only imagine what the scene will be like the first time one of these young women tries to set a limit with one of those guys. Say, the first time she decides that she doesn’t want to have sex with him. There will probably be hell to pay.

The dangers of failing to socialize our young men. I can think of no more effective way to create an abuser than to take a boy, raise him with no limits, give him whatever he wants, excuse his misbehaviors, allow his bullying to go on uninterrupted, believe that he can do no wrong, allow him to think that he is allowed to simply take whatever he wants, and never make him learn the meaning of the word “no.”

That is a recipe for both relationship violence and for sexual assault.

(Exposure to violence as a child can also contribute to later violence, but the research suggests that for every boy who grew up in an abusive household and who goes on to batter his partner, there are two other boys who grew up in that same situation who do not harm women. So I’d be a lot more concerned about whether or not a guy can tolerate hearing the word “no” rather than just about whether or not he grew up with violence.)

It seems pretty reasonable to assume that the young men down the cove – who have been such a pain in the ass for so many years to nearly everyone they encounter – will also be overly-entitled jerks in their relationships with women. These guys take what they want, when they want, and how they want. And no adult has ever made them stop. These young men are like overgrown toddlers. But whereas a toddler’s rage is largely ineffective, these boys could be very dangerous indeed.

There is an old saying that goes: “Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems!” And the young men down the road are still just big children. Their parents have utterly failed to provide for their kids’ developmental needs, and the young men will no doubt continue to create problems for others (and for themselves) for a long time to come.

As I have happily watched this year’s broods of goslings learn to fly, to swim, and to hunt for food under the wise and ever-vigilant watch of their avian parents, I am very pleased to see that this set of babies does not run the risk of being intentionally run over by a jetski. These baby birds are having their needs met.

But at the same time I wonder just when the young women guests down the road will become the next target of those often cruel, overly entitled, overgrown little boys.