Should parents of recent juvenile felons be publicly exposed?
Objective: Create consequences for poor parenting.
@jurban That's a hard question to answer. I don't have enough data to confidently give an answer either way, really.
What I will say is that modern societal and household dynamics appear to minimize the role of parents in their children's lives (whether by design or by happenstance I cannot say);
Most parents spend very little time with their children (in many cases almost none), especially compared to what was typical historically, greatly diminishing the likely degree of culpability.
@IrelandTorin
Interesting.
My experience is the exact opposite. My friends are helicopters and my parents (and most of my childhood friends) were AWOL.
I was assuming that we needed more parental involvement in underprivileged children's lives. The lack thereof is a potential reason why we're seeing kids shoot football players in downtown San Francisco.
@jurban There is a difference between being a helicopter parent and spending time with your kids.
The former implies overprotection and an excessive degree of control - which is not healthy.
The latter does not - & actually, I think if parents spent more time *with* their children, mentally present/focusing on interacting with them *as people* instead of fixating on control, societal expectations (eg: obsessing over extracurricular activities like sports), etc... the situation would be better.
@jurban I should note that I primarily mean *earlier* in life, during the most crucial formative years.
I do not believe it is healthy to be pawning off two, three, or four-year-olds on daycare workers who have zero vested interest in their long-term well-being and who are torn between trying to supervise 22 kids at once.
That is a symptom of horrifically broken societal structures, expectations, and attitudes around employment, parenting, and lifestyle (among other things).
@IrelandTorin
All good.
But the original question was more simplistic.
Are parents culpable, at all, for their kids' actions? Yes, the Crumblys are in jail, but that had a legal trail via the gun purchase. What about just doing a shitty job as a parent and the kid shoots a football player in broad daylight in downtown San Francisco?
Meanwhile, I'm signing off for the night. Will re-engage tomorrow!
G'night!
@jurban If you try to trace causal threads & assign culpability based on all the factors which led to the outcome, first you'll start grappling with the human mind's limitations (its fundamental inability to grasp causality's full complexity outside infinitesimal scopes)...
If you power through anyway, as you trace the threads of causality you will find nearly *everything* shares in the blame all the way back to the Big Bang.
Blame doesn't make much sense, objectively. It's so narrow-minded.
@jurban The question we should be asking is not whether they are culpable / responsible (because at the end of the day that question is essentially meaningless), but whether your proposed course of action would reduce the incidence of the undesirable outcomes under consideration without introducing equally bad side effects.
My suspicion is that it would not... thankfully the latter question is testable, so at societal scale there'd be no need to theorize; an A/B study could be done instead.
@jurban I will answer your question with further questions:
Are the parents of bad parents culpable for their kids' bad parenting?
Is society culpable for shaping people in such a way that they become bad parents?
Are the oil companies that for decades added tetraethyllead to gasoline, verifiably leading to massively increased rates of cognitive deficits, mental illness, paranoia, psychosis, aggression, and violent crime among the human population culpable for the resultant behaviour?