The problem with holding parents accountable for kids’ crimes

Since pop-up parties inspired and encouraged by platforms like TikTok have caused more and more disruptions at the Jersey Shore and elsewhere, there’s been an increasing call for punishing parents. It’s an understandable reaction.

For minors to do these things, they must be going unsupervised and undisciplined at home.

Parents must be no-shows in their lives. If the parent is made to pay fines for what the kid does, and possibly even spends a few nights in jail, only then will the parent start doing the job they should have been doing all along.

Now there’s a New Jersey town that has adopted an ordinance that says a parent can pay a maximum $2,000 fine and potentially spend 90 days in jail if their child won’t stop unruly behavior.

Gloucester Township passed the law on July 28. It details 28 offenses a child can commit for which the parent could pay the price. They cover things from felonies to loitering to breaking curfew.

Gloucester isn’t the first town to do such a thing.

It’s the kind of thing law and order guys like gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli have embraced. While I support his candidacy and also his position on treating juvenile offenders more like offenders and less like juveniles when it comes to the soft approach adopted in recent years, I don't support holding parents criminally accountable.

He’s right when he points out it was handcuffing our police when the Murphy administration told them they could not report underage kids caught drinking alcohol or smoking weed to their parents. But fining and locking up parents over sins committed by their children is misguided.

It assumes the parent always knows and doesn’t care, has instilled no values in their kids, and isn’t trying. Proving that will be difficult. Between the parent who is not present in a child’s life and the perfect parent who knows every step the kid takes and monitors them to the point of stunting their emotional growth are a million gray areas.

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I’ve known plenty of families with several children all raised the exact same way, same rules, same expectations. Three of the four could be good, honest kids. The fourth is always getting in trouble despite the parents’ best efforts. I’ve seen it plenty.

It isn’t always bad parenting. Making criminal cases of how exactly parents are raising their kids behind private walls is going to be a murky prospect to prosecute.

Also, how hypocritical is society when on one hand we want to hold parents accountable for crimes they didn’t commit, yet if they discipline their kid in a manner the government says is abusive, like a spanking hard enough to leave marks, we throw them in jail for that, too?

Hell, we are living in a time where the government has advised schools to never disclose to a parent that their child is presenting under a different pronoun in class and not informing parents their kid was caught in public smoking weed, but at the same time, we’re going to say they should be watching them better?

Let that sink in a moment.

If a parent is so completely out of touch with their child’s existence that it can be proven they have been harmful and neglectful, charge them with endangerment and remove the child from the home. But let’s not charge them with crimes the kid did. Sometimes a kid just goes bad. Good parents can have bad kids. It’s heartbreaking, but it happens.