Toby Crowley, a friend, and fellow blogger I met last year at the Seperation of School and State Conference has posed a good, though difficult question to the NYRA forums. All candidates for the Board were asked the question, and thus far they all seem to be waiting to see what I have to say first. Darn, that’s what I was hoping, hehe, but burdened as I am with the responsibility of leadership over this rabble, I shall do my best.
Toby asked:

How do you (my various candidate) account for parental responsibility and youth freedom? I mean, if a fifteen year old knocks over my motorcycle and causes, say, a thousand dollars in damage, I’m going to his parents to get it paid for, becuase 1) he most likely won’t have the money and 2) we assume that, if he had decent parents he’s know better and therefore this is their fault.

While I haven’t done any research to back this up, I think that society at large would agree with me in holding the parents accountable. If they’re accountable, what level of authority should they have over his actions? What discipline should they be allowed to use? (This is a tough question because I’ll tell you know I was a difficult child.)

If the parents aren’t liable for his behavior (translation: if they have no authority over the fictional fifteen year-old) what recourse do I have to get my money back?

Tired of waiting, and not thinking it was fair to ask others a question he was unable to answer himself, Toby gave it some thought and came up with his own answer:

Basically, I support emancipation for minors who feel they could do better on their own than with bad parents. In the case of emanicpated “youth,” I’d expect all the same rights and responsibilities granted to adults to apply and as a consequence I’d expect the fifteen-year-old, were he emancipated, to pay for the damage he caused to my motorcycle in the question.

In the even he wasn’t emancipated, I’d say that his parents indeed are liable for the cost of repairs, because they are responsible for teaching him how to behave. To teach him, I would allow them a broad amount of authority over the fifteen-year-old, from corporal punishment to the right to “invade” the “privacy” of his room.

Toby is on the right track, and indeed he proposes a consistent, non-ageist solution to the problem, and one I have indeed toyed with and advocated myself, yet I don’t think its one I can subscribe to. Allowing the degree of authority over kids that Toby advocates I feel is counterproductive and damaging. I don’t believe more discipline is the answer to his concern of “feral children”, though I do think parenting has to change greatly and thread a difficult needle.

Toby’s arch-nemesis, the “feral child”, often a person in their twenties, is someone who has too much freedom and not enough responsibility. Since I rarely can see too much freedom as a bad thing, at fault here is lack of responsibility. A problem affecting people of all ages and backgrounds. Parenting, and indeed society, have a huge affect on this lack of responsibility, but I come from a different place than Toby.

Unlike his roommate, my friend Buddy had the opposite problem - too much authority. His step-dad, a former Marine, was always very strict with him, and never afforded him much in the way of trust, respect, or freedom growing up. He was perpetually grounded for one thing or another, and at no point do I remember Buddy being allowed outside except for school and work. In fact even to gain the esteemed privilege of being his friend at school, I had to come and be interviewed by the step-dad. He was on lock-down until the day he left home. After leaving home he had a rough couple years and is now on lock-down in the state prison.

Buddy could be described as one of the “feral children” by Toby, albeit a hardened, violent version. He never learned to be responsible because he was never allowed to. I believe we learn from our mistakes, perhaps it is the only real way we do learn. Children raised in an environment where they are never allowed to make mistakes, never learn. Or more precisely, children raised in an environment where they are never allowed to make free decisions never make their own mistakes, and thus never learn.

Buddy had responsible behavior and choices imposed on him from his step-dad. He learned how to say “yes sir” and “no sir”, not the difference between right and wrong. When you take such a person who has never learned responsibility and put him in a situation where he no longer has someone looking over him every minute, making decisions for him, bad things happen. Buddy, after leaving home, got into hard drugs, serious crime, and ultimately prison. So in shorthand, no freedom equals no responsibility.

Bad parenting can take another form besides tyrannical - it can be coddling. Kids who are given a great deal of freedom but whose parents shield them from the consequences of their choices by cleaning up their messes and fixing their problems also never learn responsibility. Overbearing parents who try to fix their kid’s bad grades by arguing with teachers, or those rich enough to buy a new car every time their kid crashes one fit into this category. While these parents are far different from my friend’s, their terrible error is the same. They prevent kids from learning from their mistakes.

Most people believe parenting styles exist only between these two extremes. Whenever I criticize strict, tyrannical parents for spying on their kids, or harshly punishing them I am accused of favoring the coddling approach. This is quite far from the truth, yet most people are ignorant that there is a third way.

The third way of course is one where parents allow their children to make their own choices, and thus learn from their own mistakes. This view is articulated well (and taken to its extreme) by the Taking Children Seriously movement. This I feel is the only proper youth rights method of parenting. While I don’t yet stake my reputation on the success of non-coercive parenting in every situation as I don’t have kids and have little real experience with younger kids, I do believe it is the direction we should all be heading.

I must be careful though, posting links and assigning credit, because there is a huge amount written about Taking Children Seriously (TCS) and its proponents have very strict and extensive philosophical guidelines that control how they interact with their kids. So as I am not 100% familiar with how TCS would handle individual situations, I do not presume to speak for them, and thus lets keep TCS in mind but not dwell on them. At least not until I better familiarize myself with it and decide whether I want to sign on fully or not.

Anyways… parents should as much as possibly seek to treat their children in much the same manner they would treat other adults. How spouses behave toward each other, or parents & grown children, serve as good examples. A father’s demand that “as long as you live in MY house, you follow MY rules” is only credible if he applies that same rule to his wife and his elderly mother who may also be living in HIS house.

But I am getting off-track from the discussion of responsibility, freedom, and liability. If we want kids to learn to be responsible for themselves, they must be allowed to be responsible for themselves and thus be allowed to:

A. Make choices
B. Deal with the consequences of those choices

So, to at last answer the difficult question about liability and the motorcycle, I must say that instead of parents that forbid their kids to get within 50-feet of motorcycles or parents that without hesitation will pay for any damage to motorcycles that may occur, kids should have to pay back the debt themselves. Even if they are unemancipated and living at home.

How the debt ultimately gets paid isn’t a settled deal however, but the legal liability should rest with the individual who knocked over the bike. For example, if the youth just doesn’t have the $1,000 necessary to fix the bike, which is quite plausible, perhaps the parents could loan the money and then allow their son or daughter to get a job and pay back the money according to a reasonable time table. Not because they are parents who are legally liable, but because they are parents who love and care for their child. This could take many other forms as well, but ultimately the responsibility should rest with the individual, whatever their age.

Of course, I’d imagine a 15-year-old raised in such a manner would be more responsible than most, and no doubt would have learned long before not to be careless around expensive machinery such as other people’s motorcycles.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2005 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.