B. Keywords
good parenting, parental liability.
Vocabulary
liable, legislature, legislate, load, accessible, accountable, quasi-adult, peer, affiliation, liability, merit, deter.
You're going to hear a report about whether or not parents should be held criminally liable when their kids commits crimes. Listen carefully, complete the following summary.
In just about every state, parents are held responsible for certain misdeeds of their children, especially for school related, like destroying school property or missing school.
But when kids commit crimes whether it's dealing in drugs, weapons possession or gang banging, only 13 states hold parents criminally liable.
Now in the wake of the Colorado shootings, more lawmakers are saying parents should be jailed or fined when their kids commit a crime. And there seems to be a certain logic to this trend.
The most important influence on the development of a child is the parent. When people really want is good parenting.
The question is: Can state legislatures legislate good parenting? How do you legislate good parenting? And how far should we go with that?
There should be a law that does punish parents for leaving a loaded gun around accessible for children.
That's something you can hold me accountable for. But when you tell me I should raise a child in a way...in a way that that child will not have bad thoughts or be depressed,
or not hang around with wrong kids, you're trying to legislate something that you know, parenting is not an easy thing. This is a hard job.
And it gets harder as kids get older. Study shows that when a child becomes a teenager, parents' involvement with their children under education drops sharply.
This complicates matters with the courts if they are to prove that parents should have known about the child's intentions to commit a crime or stop the child from doing it.
By 15 to 16 years of age, children in this country are treated as quasi-adults.
We also have young people of that age leading very separate life that parents are not fully informed of.
Many of those young people are working. They have a strong peer group affiliation.
Perhaps we might have some idealistic view that a law will then force parents to hold daily sessions with their children, ask them what they are doing. I just don't think that's going to work.
Parent liability laws will not work unless they're part of a much larger effort that includes more help for parents in raising their children, whether they want it or not.
A judge can require a parent to go through psychological testing if the judge sees that there would be some merit not only in helping the child in their situation, but also helping the home situation.
According to the National Association of State Legislatures, half a dozen states are expected to take up the issue of parental liability this year.
Family law experts say that what's most needed now is a thorough review of the effectiveness of such laws,
before more put in place, because as far they simply don't seem to be deterring school shootings, let alone bad parenting.