I totally agree we should be teaching our kids to not bother people who obviously aren’t interested. And like pretty much everything that a kid should be taught, we need to try teaching them as early as possible. I never meant to imply anything else, and I apologize if my post came off as some sort of “boys will be boys” type argument. That kind of mindset really isn’t acceptable.
But in regards to “It doesn’t matter how old they are…” yes, yes it does matter how old they are. He’s too young to realize what he’s doing. That boy probably can’t speak more than 20 words, plus he has to learn the rules for social interaction before he can be judged for not following them. Interactions like this, even though he’s messing it up, are learning opportunities for him. Things exactly like this are what tells him what he should and shouldn’t do and why. So even though he didn’t do the right thing, this is an experience he can draw on in the future. Next time he meets another child, he might think for a moment: “Oh, but the last time I went to hug someone they didn’t like it. Maybe I should be cautious and not grab them.”
His brain is not developed enough for him to have a functioning moral compass at that age. He doesn’t see the situation as him forcing himself on someone who doesn’t like him. His brain is saying, “I want a hug. When I hug people, they always hug me back. That’s how hugs work. This person must not realize how hugs work, so I’ll keep trying until they understand.” Here, he is learning that just because he wants a hug, doesn’t mean that the other person does.
He’s testing the boundaries of something that he once learned was concrete from his family: that hugs are reciprocated. When his hug isn’t reciprocated, it confuses him because it breaks the “rules” of hugging that he’s come to perceive as truth. He’s trying to see if he can get the “rules” to work again, or if there are new rules he didn’t know about before, which is the case here. This is something babies do when learning and experiencing new things.
For a baby, it isn’t as simple as “Don’t do that because it’s bad/wrong/incorrect.” Sometimes they have to make mistakes to learn from them because they don’t understand it any other way. Especially two year olds, who are not very good at following directions and not doing whatever they feel like doing. This goes for academics, perception, and yes,even morals. We should always strive to teach them not to do that when they’re young, but I would not label the actions of a two year old as any type of harassment, especially sexual harassment, which is the assumption of most people who would look at this post.
To reiterate: he’s a fucking baby.