Where Were the Parents When Their Kids Were Murdering? Not Murdering.Posted on 12/31/2010
Kids blame their parents for everything bad in their
lives. It’s what they do when their moms ground them for skateboarding down the
stair rail.
All those rules kids have to harsh out, all the
uncool restrictions, all that lack of understanding about what it’s like to be a
kid. Or maybe not enough rules, if you wonder how celebrity children Lindsay
Lohan, Chastity Bono, Paris Hilton, Todd Bridges, and the Osbornes were allowed
to go so far off track.
Who’s responsible for a child’s drug addiction,
sexually transmitted disease, rebellion, delinquency, bullying and antisocial
behavior, insobriety, shoplifting, tagging, vandalism, grand theft auto,
breaking into the family gun cabinet, and bad fashion, bad attitude, and crude
tattoos?
Maybe you got one of “them bad seed-type kids” and
you happen to be one of them dads what tells their children to take Possum Pete
out in the yard and play, and says “Git-ur done” every few sentences or so:
mental twistage guaranteed for the kid in this household.
The law wants to blame parents for everything, too,
but with much stricter punishments than a teen huff and an “Ahh, Mom!” And the
law reflects the tastes of childless adults and mistake-free parents.
Legislation that holds parents criminally responsible for the actions of their children has been around for hundreds of years. “Parent Responsibility Acts have been around for centuries and almost every state has some form of parental responsibility statute which makes parents, or legal guardians, obligated to pay their child's restitution for property damage, personal injury, larcenies and vandalism. These statutes generally are related to their child's negligent, intentional or willful acts that take place prior to their age of majority, which is 18 in most states, but 19 and 21 in a few.” (Taylor)
The “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” laws
are popular in over 40 states. The idea is that if parents can’t
voluntarily exercise reasonable control of their children, then the law will
step in with fines and prison terms to ensure proper parental supervision.
Parents have been imprisoned. This is real, and the damage is serious to
parents.
The use of the vague term “reasonable” in the
“contributing” statutes allows courts to interpret whatever they like in
sanctioning parents, and the “inability of the original statute to define
practical, realistic, and comprehensible standards for the court to use
consistently in determining parental negligence or incompetence is what led to
the laws in [Connecticut, Louisiana, Oregon, and Wyoming] being declared
unconstitutional.” (Ref
Link to full article). The
majority of states use comparative negligence tests to determine who’s
responsible for specific acts committed by children and to what degree.
Parents have enough trouble trying to find the right
balance of permissiveness and strictness to also worry that every time their
teens leave the house, the next knock at the door will be the police to arrest
them for something their teens did.
The presumption behind court penalties that punish
parents is that the parents failed in their responsibility to provide sufficient
positive moral guidance about conforming with the values of society, that the
failure results in disruption and damage to the community through the child’s
criminal acts, and that court orders, financial penalties, and jail time imposed
on the parents will somehow correct this failure after the fact.
If the child makes only one mistake, exercises poor
judgment in one situation, both the child and the parents can be forgiven. But a
child’s persistent antisocial behavior might require that society, with the full
force of the law, make a stronger impression on parents to get serious in
setting the child on a better path. Of course, if poor parenting skills are the
reason behind the child’s inability to make good choices, punishing the parents
doesn’t improve those skills. Fines and restitution payments drain the parent’s
resources (and a high percentage of households with a juvenile delinquent are
characterized by economic disadvantage), and jailing removes all parental
control except for rudimentary influence in a few heart-to-hearts between parent
and truant over a small table in a jailhouse visiting room; yes, police in
school districts in several states that “put children first” arrest the parents
of kids who skip school!
The child might feel bad for the trouble his behavior
got his parent into. He’ll feel bad if he was in a single-parent household and
now he has to be shuffled around to other relatives or temporary foster parents
until his parent is released and can take custody again. He might feel bad that
his jailed/fined parent frowns in stern disappointment at him—and authority
figures often use peer pressure as a deterrent factor in reaction to teen
misbehavior—that he’ll kick his drug habit, disown all of his rampage friends
and no longer want to be accepted in street gangs, find some other activity that
excites him as much as stealing cars and driving fast and sexually assaulting
school girls, and he won’t escalate o armed robbery to support himself so he
won’t have to live by anyone else’s rules. Will a juvenile delinquent stop all
of his bad ways because his parent has been punished? Doubtful, and no evidence
supports this kind of transformation. It’s also doubtful because even the
stupidest teen who’s major league susceptible to peer pressure knows that it
wasn’t his behavior that got his parent punished, but the bad law that
required punishment for an well-intentioned family bystander. Parents as
collateral damage in the war on teens.
Penalties and jail time also will not cure a parent’s
alcoholism, irresponsibility, or habit of mentally abusing his children. Parents
who the courts accuse of neglect will still have to work two jobs and see their
children less than an hour a day due to employment responsibilities. No amount
of training in communication and negotiation skills, in parenting style,
in the importance of consistency, in how to praise and reward teenagers will
help if the parent has no time to exercise this interpersonal training with his
children.
These variables make the practice of punishing the
wrong party ineffective, just as forcibly assigning responsibility onto any
blameless party is ineffective for all but browbeaten, guilt-ridden losers who
are so desperate to please authority that they shoulder the responsibility in
resignation.
There is still the criminal activity of the child to
deal with, and the value of the damage he’s done to property, practical matters
that must be corrected.
Fortunately, a juvenile detention infrastructure has
some experience in handling bad kids, rehabilitating them, and imposing
discipline and structure. And the law allows for garnishing salaries for child
support from deadbeat dads, for example, even if such garnishment of a teen’s
salary has to wait until the teen starts earning one. Kids are permitted to do
farm work and run paper routes and babysit and mow lawns and sell lemonade
(after paying the $900 municipal small-business licensing fee) to pay off
property damage they cause in their boys-being-boys antics. It isn’t against the
State’s own child labor laws to give teens the option of working off their debt
by doing some menial work for the state.
Solutions for adults who behave badly can be used for
teens who behave badly, which isn’t advocating the effectiveness of adult
incarceration, but suggests that a time-out from anti-social children might have
a beneficial effect on the parent/teen relationship by showing the teen a harsh
life comparison–you don’t know how good you got it ‘til it gets really bad.
Parents also have the option of legally relinquishing their parental rights, sort of an emancipation from the monsters under their roofs, if their teens are deemed unresponsive to reform; if parents can’t be charged for the crimes of emancipated children, or children who’ve reached the legal age of adulthood, why can they be charged and expected to be personally responsible for the child’s actions because the child is younger and happens to live in same home? This makes as much rational sense as the disproportionate punishment of throwing homeowners in jail and seizing their home and assets because the Narco Squad found an ounce of pot in a shoebox in the child’s bedroom closet.
Police power doesn’t have to be rational.
Parents have a role in the development of their
children, and bad parents don’t do a good job in that role. Some parents are
unwilling to address their children’s problems, because confrontation is
uncomfortable. Some parents stay in the shadows because their children
physically intimidate them. Some are too stressed in the process of trying to
make economic ends meet to be bothered with their children. Some don’t love
their children, aren’t affectionate and loving and physically demonstrative, and
could care less what their children as long as they don’t get caught. Some evade
their parenting responsibilities because they realize the massive effort it
takes to be a good parent, to be consistent in their discipline and reasoning,
to be emotionally and physically available for their children; they’d rather
spend their time having adult fun. Some don’t know how to build strong
relationships with their children, never learned more than how to potty train
them, can’t get along with others in the family, and can’t seem to develop an
interest in their children’s activities or school projects. They’re not involved
with their children, don’t bond, and avoid interaction with their children
because they have so few interests in common. Some see their kids as lost
causes, too stupid and irrational to get through to. Some blame their unplanned
children and the required responsibility to take care of them for ruining their
own life plans, their own glorious vision of personal success represented in a
shitty diaper.
These aren’t excuses. They’re life facts. They’re
just a few of the ways that different adults choose to handle their individual
problems. Should life facts be made different by society when those facts yield
conditions that aren’t ideal for children or society? No. Should situational
factors be changed so that parents can focus on their children as priorities in
their lives? No. Shouldn’t parents always put their kids’ welfare and
development first? No.
Parents and adults must survive in order that
children can be cared for.
People lead separate lives, and no amount of control
exerted by others over a parent’s life is going to change the fact that
individuals have different priorities. Prison sentences and fines, essentially
criminalizing parenthood, will change a parent’s priorities, but not likely
toward becoming a better parent. A fine doesn’t change the complex
patterns–doesn’t untangle the interrelated problems–in a family, and can’t
correct how a parent deals with raising his troubled teens. Punishments that are
built in to parental responsibility laws worsen a parent’s ability to give his
child security, love, and monetary advantages. Reduction of resources by fining
parents also has a ripple effect through the family, so that other children are
forced to ration and cut back. And how often has even a mediocre absentee parent
been considered good for a child? When has having a dad in jail not created a
stigma for a child when asked by classmates what his dad does for a living?
Are bad parents completely to blame for the choices
that their teen children make? Is the correlation between the child’s behavior
and the parents’ raising of the child so incontrovertibly strong, given all of
the other influences in a child’s life outside of the home? Is the tree
responsible for how far away the apple drops? Is being a bad role model grounds
for legal censure?
Hmmm. How to make parents care more about their
children’s psychosocial development? Oh, I know. Jail the parents. That won’t
make them resent their children.
There are so many child specialists with so many
theories about the right way to raise children. Some think a military academy is
the right approach, while others think getting children hooked on hydroponics is
the natural answer. Permissive parents tell their children that the consequences
of their actions aren’t good or bad, just a part of learning how to deal with
the world. Parents who practice a program of respecting the privacy of their
children never learn of the drugs and drug money and arsenal and Nazi flyers
under their children’s beds, and only if these are found to exist by legal
authorities are the parents morally raked over the coals by other judgmental
parents and Child Protective Services agents. Tough love parents get sued by
their kids or the neighbors, or gain scrutiny by parental surrogates in the
government. Overprotective parents don’t give their children enough leeway to
practice and model personal responsibility, and these children develop a
defeatist attitude, feeling that they don’t control outcomes in their lives,
some surrendering to the external control by forcing parents to assume every
responsibility in their lives as a means of revenge. Children who intentionally
refuse to accept blame for their actions carry over this coping method into
adulthood.
Even if emotional stability can be taught early in a
child’s development, life doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and parents can’t be
expected to have all of the answers or to be perfect. And what’s the alternative
to not raising one’s children perfectly? Somebody else in the Child Protective
Services racket may be along and raise him wrong, too. Holding parents legally
responsible is ludicrous and asks parents to make slaves of their children, a
bad thing that opens the parents to prosecution for child endangering or
kidnapping. The parent isn’t the only adult who failed to teach his children
right (school teachers and day care providers and little league coaches and
school bus drivers are also expected to take some responsibility for children),
but parental responsibility laws make it the parent’s responsibility if the
child does wrong.
Parents who have allowed their teenagers and their
friends, who would be staying the night, to drink alcohol in their homes have
been prosecuted under Social Host and contributing to the delinquency of minors
laws. This kind of infraction doesn’t depend on whether or not the parent
provides the alcohol directly to the underage children. Parents use the defense
that they are protecting their children, who would be drinking somewhere else if
allowed to go out, by monitoring their behavior in the home and knowing that
they wouldn’t be driving while intoxicated. They choose to risk the law rather
than unrealistically pretend that they can somehow forbid their teenagers to
drink and then be everywhere with their teens at all times to ensure compliance
with this house rule. Other parents find it more practical to ignore their
teens’ drunkenness because if they say they didn’t know (and don’t want to
know), then they can’t be held responsible, legally or morally.
Numerous legal cases have been tried in which parents
are charged with some degree of liability in their children’s actions. In one
case, parents were charged for a misdemeanor while their teenage daughter was
charged with felony vehicular manslaughter because the drag-racing teen lost
control of the parent’s BMW and killed two people. Her parents knew she wasn’t
the most skilled driver, and yet they’d let her drive their BMW, the same car
they routinely drove, which had “bad” tires and brakes. All vehicles are deemed
unsafe with a bad driver at the wheel, but only when a vehicle is involved in an
accident and the police have a reason to examine it does anyone have the
opportunity to pass the judgment that the vehicle was unsafe, based on a strict
standard of what qualifies in legally defining tires and brakes as bad. The
daughter was at fault, not the vehicle. She was a bad driver, having full
knowledge that speeding is illegal. Having driven the car to the race site, she
knew the car’s weaknesses and the need to compensate for those weaknesses, and
making a conscious choice, she failed to ensure the highest degree of safety by
conforming her behavior to prevailing conditions. She failed to maintain control
of the vehicle and is guilty of reckless driving. Her parents weren’t in the car
with her and she hadn’t told them that she would be drag racing with it, or that
there was a good chance if they gave her the car keys, that she would drive, a
privilege that the state licensing bureau had qualified her to do and is
partially responsible for suggesting her readiness for the responsibility of
driving, and that she might be in a car accident and kill her boyfriend and
somebody else.
In other cases, parents are expected to have known
that their children had acquired firearms, had stashed them in their rooms or in
the basement, were behaving more anti-socially than ever, and were planning to
take the guns to school one day with a buddy to shoot as many of their
classmates and teachers as they could. Because they don’t know what their
brooding, noncommunicative teens are thinking or planning until the teens act,
the parents are responsible, according to the victims and some in the legal
community, for the final murderous acts of their children.
Laws that accommodate victim consensus or public
opinion rather than justice and individual liberty are bound to be bad.
The children knew that they were purchasing illegal
firearms, and that’s why they kept their possession of them a secret. Bullies
know that it’s wrong to take other kid’s property, and that’s why they
intimidate their victims into not tattling, so that the bullies’ parents rarely
learn of their child’s bad behavior.
Parents who know that their children have committed a
crime and help them evade detection and capture or take steps to cover up the
crime, such as cleaning a victim’s blood from a car that the child used in a
hit- and-run accident, are active accessories to their children’s crimes and can
be charged as accessories after the fact. Such charges against the parents are
valid, and parents enjoy no protections against incriminating their children as
spouses enjoy against incriminating each other.
Victims of low violence crimes committed by children
are lenient and forgiving and merciful of the children because they believe that
children make mistakes, don’t understand the moral implications of their
actions, have more to learn, and are not wholly responsible since they are still
living in the guardian care of their parents or step-parents or one parent or
grandparents or foster parents–or some adult who can be sued for the child’s
criminal behavior.
Forgiving a child of his criminality is the victim’s
mistake.
Children grow up very fast, and, as with everyone
else, the principles of conditioning and punishment apply; they will never learn
to take responsibility for their behavior if somebody else is forced to suffer
the consequences. Teens are conscious when they make decisions to act. They know
right from wrong and often choose wrong just to see what will happen or why
wrong is considered wrong. They make the choice to act, which makes them
responsible for their own behavior. They know that when they do something that
neither their parents nor society approves of or condones, they’re testing their
limits to see what they can get away with. When their parents are held
accountable for the actions of their teens, the teens have ipso facto “gotten
away with it”.
State law declares that children of a certain age
cannot be held responsible for their actions or for consenting to participate in
sex, but the law makes a number of exceptions. Based solely on the vicious,
heinous, and depraved nature of a crime committed by a child, the child can be
legally declared an adult for the purpose of passing a more commensurate
punishment. In such instances, the child’s parents can no longer be held
responsible for the acts of the child-declared-adult. In these cases, it is
plain to see that the courts know that defining laws based on the criteria age
is just a bogus practicality that allows the legal community to draw technically
accurate lines of responsibility with absolutely no regard for facts in
individual cases—except when cases shock the shit out of the community. Maturity
and being responsible for one’s actions don’t know a specific age or age group.
Parents and guardians aren’t legally responsible for
the willful illegal acts of their children unless the parents specifically
guided them to commit the crime (when such guidance and abetting can be proven),
or unless the parents could have foreseen the child’s intentions and failed to
take reasonable steps to prevent the crime. Parents can be charged with the same
crimes that their children commit or with criminal negligence, neglect, child
abuse and accessory, of course, but they are rarely convicted, unless the judge
and jury and prosecution are strong proponents of the rights of victims,
regardless of who the victimizer may be, and the duties of the parents. When
victim’s rights are paired with parental responsibility attitudes, court judges
can make some fairly warped interpretations of existing statutes and precedents.
Then there are cases like the Provenzino’s in
Michigan in 1995, in which the parents were fined a hundred dollars for
violating their city’s ordinance that placed an affirmative responsibility on
parents to exercise reasonable control over their children, and the Provenzino’s
kid was just plain bad, using and selling drugs, burgling a home, in a detention
center once. Other laws have been on the books that demand an affirmative duty
to provide for the care and upkeep for one’s children–feeding, clothing, and
housing them. Failing in this can incur penalties, enforceable by court orders
that vary by state: forced participation in “juvenile proceedings; financial
responsibility for restitution payments and court costs; financial
responsibility for detention, treatment, and supervisory costs; participation in
treatment, counseling, or other diversion programs; and criminal responsibility
and possible jail time for parents found negligent in their supervision.” (Link
to full article)
If the state, through parent responsibility laws, thinks a child can be raised more effectively and can punish both good and bad parents for the bad acts of their children, then the state is taking on the responsibility of raising our children. Because of the vested interest they have in parenting the children in their jurisdiction, the state should recuse itself in any legal proceedings. Since that won’t happen in any Nanny State near you, the least you can do if you want to protect yourself is to drill this admittedly self-serving mantra into your children’s heads: don’t get caught.
Another TopicPosted on 06/03/2010
More development here.
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