Would It be Fair If Parents Were Legally Responsible for Crimes Committed by Their Children?

In some countries (whether in past or nowadays), parents are (were) tried for crimes committed by their children. Imagine that such a law would be instituted in your country (if it is not already). Now, we can get to the important question – Would it be fair if parents were legally responsible for crimes committed by their children?

No seems to be the obvious answer. However, devote some more time to this question please. You know that such a law would surely help to decrease children criminality. So, it would certainly be useful. But, why couldn’t it be fair too? Nothing stands in the way of creating a fair law regarding this matter.

Parents are already responsible for cases when their child gets hurt (at least in most countries). If they leave their little joy out of their sight and he/she get hurt or even killed (by accident of course, if someone hurts the child on purpose he gets tried not the parents), they usually have problems with the justice system. They are responsible for their child’s well-being. Parents are also responsible for teaching their children how to behave. They should teach them what is wrong and that hurting others is a bad thing.

However, many parents fail to educate their minors in ways of morality and legality. It is usually a child of such parents that commits a crime. So, in fact parents are indeed responsible for their child committing a crime (at least in most cases). And they deserve to be punished for their irresponsibility. Of course, for such a law to be fair, the child would have to be tried for his/her crime and the parent would have to be tried for ignoring the child’s upbringing. Though, the child would also need to be inspected by psychiatrists as mentally ill (crazy) child is unpredictable. Parents of such children can try as hard as they can and they would never succeed in teaching their minors how to behave in socially acceptable way.

To conclude, the fair law for punishing parents whose child commits a crime is indeed possible to create. It would also be useful as it would persuade many irresponsible parents into devoting much more attention to upbringing of their children. So, the answer to the initial question (Would it be fair if parents were legally responsible for crimes committed by their children?) is definitely Yes.