From: caroline@sco.COM (friend of a fiend)
Newsgroups: alt.parents-teens
Subject: Re: Runaways
Date: Wed, 08 Apr 92 21:46:53 GMT
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.


In article <1992Mar31.225148.18075@cco.caltech.edu> danlip@cco.caltech.edu (Daniel Adam Lipofsky) writes:

>.... In addition, by her actions, she also supports
>the gross human rights violations which occur daily in this country,
>mainly that those under 18 years of age are denied the rights of free
>movement and are jailed without trial and without committing any crime.
>While her actions may have been legally required, they were ethically
>wrong.  When the law conflicts with what is right, a person must make a
>choice.  In my opinion, the wrong choice was made.

This is an issue that I have given some thought to, on both sides
of the question.

I left home at 16, moved from the Bay Area suburbs to San Francisco
and got a job and supported myself.  I did this without my parents'
permission, though to their credit, they did not actively place 
obstacles in my path.

Now, my daughter is 15, and I am facing the other side of the question.
She is not willing to get a job to help pay for the things she wants.
She's really not very responsible on her own, and typically has 
resisted all of my attempts to help her impose some structure on her
life.  She's doing really well in a group home, though, and I really
thought this would be just the most awful choice I could make.  It
hasn't turned out to be that way.  

Anyhow, about these lack of the rights of free movement for kids, or
the right not to be "incarcerated" when no crime has been committed,
here's some of the issues I have been thinking about on this subject
of how much "right" do I have as a parent to make some fairly major
decisions on my daughter's behalf.  This ended up being a little
longer than I originally intended, hope that's ok. 

IF I could expect that my daughter would be behaving in such a way
that I would never have to suffer major repercussions from her actions,
I would at this point be giving her nearly total freedom over her life.
But this is not the case.  If she does something that causes her to get
arrested (and she has done this), I am expected to pay the costs of the
court trial and, should it come to that, for her incarceration in juvenile
hall.  That is not something that occurs between two legal adults.  In 
her case, because a shoplifting charge was a first offense, what actually
happened was that she was assigned to a local counselling agency for
"intervention".  But I was required to go, also (family counselling),
and I had to pay.  I had personally done nothing wrong, and in fact,
have always done my level best to teach her that stealing is wrong.
Is this not an equally bad "human rights violation"?  Why should I be 
required to be responsible for the actions of someone who is clearly
old enough and intelligent enough that she ought to be able to make
her own decisions on this matter?  Why should I have to give up any of
my "free" time away from work for an offense that I did not commit?

Let's say that the question is in regards to her friends.  There 
are a couple of guys she claims to be friends with, and I have heard
from her and from other parents about real problems with a couple of
these kids.  They have been arrested for burglary.  One of them was
involved with a situation where another girl my daughter's age, and
the boy, stole a handgun from the girl's parents.  (Let's not get into
an argument about the ethics of owning guns, please, the situation is
that it is currently legal for adults to own a gun.)  I told my daughter
that although I realized I could not prevent her from associating with
this kid away from my home, that she was under no circumstances to
bring this kid to our house.  There were the usual arguments about
how these kids "didn't steal from friends", but I pointed out to her
that since they didn't know who my friends were, they might not be
stealing from me, but from my close friends.  I think she heard me,
but my saying this did not seem to make a lot of difference in her
eventual behavior.  Anyhow, to make the story short, she did bring
this boy to the house, and some things of mine have disappeared, taken
by various of her friends.  In some cases I know who took the things,
and in other cases, things are just missing.  I have to replace them,
and personally, I don't think this is very fair either.  It's not
like my budget is so massive that it can suddenly absorb the impact.

I finally locked my house up at one point with a new lock, so that 
she could not bring these kids over in my absence.  I left a note
on the door that said if she needed anything, please call me at work,
I'd be happy to come home and let her in to get it, but she and two 
friends broke into the house, smashed up several walls and wrote 
some really nasty graffiti on others, generally trashed up the place.
I had to pay for the repairs and cleaning and so forth, of course.
I was told by the cop that took the police report that it's "not illegal" 
for a kid to smash up the place he or she lives (although this was 
rented property, not even mine), even though it was the local youth 
counselling/crisis intervention agency that had advised me to call 
the cops in the first place.  Now, who can I believe here?  If the
mental health folks are telling me "call the cops" and the cops are 
saying "we can't help you", where have MY "human rights" as a parent
gone?  Don't I have the right to expect better behavior out of my kid,
don't I have the right to back it up somehow?  I've got to pay every
time for the consequences of this other person's actions, and yet I
can't get any help backing up these legal responsibilities when she
doesn't behave?  If this were another adult, I'd be free to walk away 
from this kind of behavior, but because it's my kid, I'm not.  You 
can believe that this whole incident left me wondering just where 
parents' rights have gone in today's society.

Locally, it is not against the law for a kid to run away from home.
On the surface of it, I think that's probably just as well.  But
if a kid does leave home for whatever reasons, then should the 
parents still have to be financially responsible for anything that
kid does while no longer living at home?  Why?

My point is that there may be much more than just an abuse of kids' 
rights going on here.  There are the parents' rights to consider,
too.  I'll be the first to admit that I think there are often cases
where the parents are so out of line in their expectations that the
kids have the right of it.  But until you've heard the parents' side
of things, better not to make this an automatic assumption.

Anyhow, these are some of the questions I'm asking myself on these
issues, and I don't have any very good answers.

=caroline=
-- 

It's been a bloody odd day.... not even a two plus two equals five kind of
day, more like two plus two equals ... fish ... or something.

						-- from 'Cages'