Boys Will Be Boys and Other Reasons for Theft

A weird thing happened to us twice this week, and the idea of it is still annoying me. At two different outings, two different boys toddled over to my daughter, snatched whatever toy she was playing with and toddled away. Emmeline is a few months over 2 now, and has long ago stopped snatching things from other people's hands, and so I could see she was perplexed that such an obvious atrocity would befall her. So of course she started to cry.

I looked up at the other parents and on both occasions, they shrugged and said something along the lines of, "Boys will be boys."

What does that mean?

As a parent of a girl, have I missed something? Is it now socially acceptable for boys to snatch crap from other people' hands? If it was one occasion, I would have shrugged it off as a playground parent who was probably into a good book and didn't want to be bothered. I could totally understand that. But two different people — offering the same reasons for why it's OK for boys to bully others? Did Po Bronson write some article saying that's OK now?

I wanted to put it up review, just to see if this was the all-around world view: Boys will be boys — they can do whatever they want. Fact or fiction?