Teenage crime and family responsibility

My mother’s favourite saying …”tell me the company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are “

I think your post demonstrates that it an be either ENO. Parents who don't care are perhaps more culpable than parents with addictions, and definitely more culpable than those who find it impossible to retain control despite their best efforts.

I don't think that parents should be punished for the crimes of their children, but I don't know if 'badness' is nature or nurture.

When you say 'it has been suggested', has this been mooted somewhere? (There is a similar thread on Mumsnet, which is why I ask.) I think it would put a lot of pressure on parents to disown their children if they were threatened with sanctions - maybe at a time when they are needed most.

Probably many parents are culpable in some way - if they bring up children to have no respect for others, or to see violence as acceptable for instance - but sometimes they will have acted with good intentions, or just not had enough resources to do better than they did.

I think that some people are just 'bad', and others are victims of circumstance and bad company. Most parents won't set out to be hopeless - like most of us, they simply pass on the values they learnt from their own upbringing, and not everyone has a good one.

(that's a long-winded way of saying that I don't know )

My dd has worked with young offenders in the past. Many of the ones who eventually end up in court have a long history of challenging behaviour. Depending on circumstances, families are offered help to get their child back on track. Engagement with services by family is an important element of helping these young people so I can’t see the point of punishing parents if they’re already doing their best for their child.

Sometimes a child simply does ‘go bad’, though, despite their upbringing. It happened to a friend of ours and it broke his heart to see what eventually became of his son, an utter tragedy.

It’s been raised whether the family of that feral child should bear some responsibility and perhaps be charged with a connected offence.

I assume such a charge would involve a tribunal or Court to ascertain the degree of culpability of the parent(s), adding another layer of bureaucracy, admin, red-tape, box-ticking, form-filling, assessment, etc, etc.

Disengaged parents leading chaotic lives being forced into accounting for themselves would IMO open up a Pandora's Box and I'm not sure how much impact such a threat of punishment would have in creating a more tempered and stable home environment. If parents are actually committing crimes themselves, there's already a legal procedure for that.

Youth crime, gang-related crimes, anti-social behaviour is, I think, complex. As others have pointed out, children from good, stable backgrounds, go rogue, while some from a totally disordered environment, somehow manage to keep out of trouble.

Children of dysfunctional, often impoverished, parents lead very narrow lives, their world is often insufficient and attenuated. Perhaps there is very little for them to look-forward to other than getting thro' school and earning money. If their options are limited, it must be quite tempting for an undeveloped mind - with little to no parental guidance - to resist the 'glamour' of belonging to a gang. And then, there's peer-pressure, too.

Tempting as it might seem, and as obvious as it is that parents have a responsibility for their offspring, I don't believe that punishing them for their children's behaviour is going to get anywhere near helping to solve the problem.

Having an absent father is one of the key factors in Male criminality so I am not sure how you are going to enforce this.

We are all the result of a genetic game of dice. The genetic make-up of two people is thrown in the air and the resulting people are the results of pure random selection. We have only to look at our own families to see how different recognisable characteristics can be seen in different family members and how that plays out in their lives.

Then there is nurture, I do not mean in the crass sense, does a family have poor values, are they addicts/criminals, but all of us, if we have more than one child will know that you need to bring up children of the same family each very differently. And we are none of us perfect parents and with the best will in the world we can get things badly wrong.

for all the above reasons, I would be very wary of blaming parents for their children's sins, but I do think much more should be done to support parents that are clearly failing

Huge generalisationgalaxy even many on here have talked about bringing their children up alone
I d rather my children were brought up by a lone parent than by a bartered mother or a bullied or downtrodden mother

It's not a generalisation it's a key risk factor for a variety of behaviours including criminality, in the same way living with domestic violence is a risk factor in the future behaviour of boys (and actually in girls just has a different type of impact). No one is saying living with domestic violence is preferable. I was criticising the absent fathers not the mothers who raised the children. In fact that was my point, would the plan be to go after the parent who had stayed around and actually parented.

I remember spending quite some time in psychology lectures at uni discussing this issue. That was way back when but there were no conclusions except that most researchers considered it was a mixture of nature and nurture. I’d go with that. As we all know, there are people with horrendous backgrounds who turn out well and contribute to society, just as there are some from so called privileged and loving families who turn out to be criminals.

I'd say it's a combination of nature and nurture

Things happen to children no matter how wonderful the nuclear family is. This can impact them too in later life.

If you look into ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) it's very interesting

I think people often don't think children suffer stress the way adults do but during key development phases