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by waste_monk
2158 days ago
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>The part of your brain that internalizes consequences doesn't fully develop until you're around 25 years old You're providing excuses for a teenager, when children become capable of understanding that stealing is bad around age 3 to 5 - he is far too old for the "idiot kid" excuse to fly. Even if he didn't get the whole "having a criminal record can ruin your future life" in the concrete sense, they should absolutely know better than to steal. They said they had no idea it was so much, but even so it is beyond belief that they thought no one would notice tens or hundreds of dollars stolen, let alone tens of thousands, or that they could get away with it. Frankly, society is far too eager to excuse criminal kids who do things like this and then cry about having to face consequences. The parents should file a police report, it will be a very harsh lesson to the kid but he has screwed up on an incredible scale. I do feel sorry for these young offenders who have their future seriously altered, but empathy should not get in the way of the parent being made whole from the crime comitted against them. |
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I actually disagree. If it was my kid, i would be willing to eat the 20k in exchange for protecting them from the legal system. That's not to say there wouldn't be consequences, i would be pretty livid, but 20k would be a small price to pay. This may be influenced though by (like many hn'ers) being employed in the tech industry, where 20k is a substantial sum, but not lifesavings amount of money.
The issue I see is that streamers are real people, with hopes dreams, etc. They may have already spent the money donated to them, etc. Sure if it was actually stolen its reasonable to require them to give it back. One of the reasons the penalty for stealing is harsh, is because it doesn't just hurt the person stole from, but also the people who were paid in the stolen money. The parent wants to be made whole without any of the consequences coming back to either the son or the parent. This isn't fair to the streamers. Either the parent needs to take the responsibility for the stolen money (which she has elected to do by not pressing charges, but it comes with a 20k price tag) or needs to throw teenager under the bus in order to be made whole under the normal legal system. In the article, the parent wants both to shield the kid from the legal system but also disavow herself from his actions. But its unfair to other hurt parties to have both. Either the parent takes on responsibility for the kid's actions or she doesn't. There is no magic loophole where the parent takes responsibility but doesn't end up with consequences, nor should there be.