Punishing parents pointless

Earlier this week, the Ad Hoc Committee for the Eradication of Crime in Laventille presented a 20-page report which called for "legislation that will make it compulsory for parents to attend court with children facing criminal charges, in addition to penalties for children’s violent conduct in schools or other public places."

This is not the first call for this kind of law. Criminologist Ramesh Deosaran has made the same recommendation several times over the past few years, most recently in a 2004 Government-commissioned report on violence and delinquency in schools. Out of 32 recommendations, number 2 is that "The relevant legislation should be tightened so as to penalise parents or guardians for having children miss school or miss homework without good excuse. Parents with children who are repeated delinquents at school should be held accountable with some modicum of penalties."

The authoritarian mindset behind these recommendations is somewhat disturbing. First, there is the assumption that the State should intrude into the parenting of children. Second, there is the Big Brother idea that the State should oversee even minor activities, such as homework. But a more liberal philosophy holds that, in matters pertaining to family, the State’s main legislative duty is to protect children from physical and sexual abuse. Such a philosophy also holds that responsible conduct on the part of citizens, such as checking children’s homework, is a matter for persuasion, not legislation. It is these enlightened ideas which have proven more effective in building stable societies.

Apart from their politically suspect assumptions, both the Ad Hoc Committee and Professor Deosaran commit an even more egregious error. They assume, as a matter of course, that how parents treat their children at home determines how the children behave outside the home. But an old Trinidadian saying has more truth — "You make a child, but you don’t make his mind."

What the most modern research shows is that, while children genetically inherit certain psychological traits from their parents, they are socialised by the environment outside the home — friends, neighbourhoods, schools. So if a child has law-abiding parents who check his homework, but he limes with youthful bandits by the corner, he may well become a delinquent, even if he is a little angel at home. And the reverse is also true. If a child has the most irresponsible and wayward parents, but he goes to a school where he has well-behaved friends and supportive teachers, he can avoid the supposed fall-out from bad parenting.

It is for these reasons that punitive laws would fall more heavily on working-class parents, who typically live in crime-ridden neighbourhoods and whose children attend schools with poor disciplinary standards.

Middle-class parents, however, typically live in peaceful neighbourhoods and their children usually attend prestige schools. Thus, their children are less likely to indulge in delinquent behaviour or, even if they do, are less likely to come before the courts on such charges.

What all this means is that, if the aim is to reduce juvenile delinquency, the Ad Hoc Committee would better expend its energies calling for improvements to the neighbourhood’s physical infrastructure and for a better education system. The call for parental legislation is not only unfair, but likely to be useless.