When are parents liable for children’s actions?
Two Pickerington couples attended a neighborhood pool party last August with their children. The parents of a 5-year-old boy have since filed a civil suit in Fairfield County against the parents of a 15-year-old boy, seeking to hold them responsible for the actions of their teenage son for allegedly sexually assault- ing the 5-year-old.
This month, Scott Macre, 43, of Upper Arlington, pleaded no contest and was found guilty of multi- ple misdemeanors after his 10-year-old daughter mistook his THC gummies for candy and shared some with four other students during lunch at Upper Arlington’s Wind- ermere Elementary School. All five children became ill, requiring treatment at a local hospital.
Breana Mathews, 24, and Antwan Robinson, 44, are awaiting trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter and endangering children after their 5-year-old daugh- ter, Serenity, fatally shot her- self on July 31 with an unattended firearm in the couple’s home on Columbus’ Northeast Side.
Situations like these are uncommon. And despite increased scrutiny of paren- tal conduct in such cases, legal experts say Ohio and many other states have laws that limit the ways a parent can be held criminally and civilly liable for their child’s conduct.
“The general rule is parents are not responsible for the conduct of their kids,” said Susan Gilles, the John E. Sullivan Professor of Law at Capital University Law School.
“There’s this ‘kids do the darnedest things theory.’ Kids accidentally hurt other kids, and it looks negligent as an adult, but it’s really not.”
Three ways Ohio parents can be held civilly liable
Gilles said there are three specific ways under Ohio law in which parents can be held civilly liable for their child’s actions. In civil lawsuits, lawyers have to prove their case by a preponder- ance of the evidence, mean- ing more likely than not, instead of the criminal stan- dard of beyond a reason- able doubt.
The first way, which Gilles said is the easiest to prove, requires that a child intentionally, maliciously or purposefully caused grievous bodily injury to another person. This statute was enacted in Ohio after the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, Gilles said.
In lawsuits involving the statute, the person filing the suit only has to prove that the parent is, in fact, the custodial parent of the child, Gilles said. However, Ohio law caps possible damages at $10,000.
In other instances, Ohio law requires proof that the parents were negligent in general or negligent by giving them access to a danger- ous instrument, such as a car or a fire arm.
Negligence can involve a dangerous instrument being given to a child. This is most commonly seen when a par- ent gives a child who is not of legal driving age the keys to a car or buys a teenager a firearm for their own per- sonal use. However, Gilles said the older a child is, the more courts are understand- ing that children and teens will act out on their own.
Teen brains aren’t fully developed
One of the reasons teens can act out, even with vague concepts of what are right and wrong behaviors, is a result of incomplete development of the brain, espe- cially in the area of executive functioning.
“Executive functioning is selective attention — being able to distinguish between environmental cues and selectively focusing, decision-making and impulsivity, making critical decisions based on the information made available to you,” said Dr. Kathleen Kruse, an assistant professor of psychiatry at University Hospitals in Cleveland. “That developmental immaturity — or the lack of ‘brakes’ from executive functioning — increases the risk for multiple factors in adolescence like aggressive or violent behavior, motor vehicle accidents, risky sexual behavior, drug use.”
Kruse, who is also a board-certified forensic psychiatrist, pediatric psychiatrist and adult psychiatrist, said the brain is not fully developed until someone is in their early to mid-20s, and on average, takes longer in males than females.
“We see that adolescents are more likely to be focused on immediate rewards as opposed to delayed gratification or long-term consequences,” Kruse said. “It’s an ‘all gas, no brakes’ approach to life.”
This lack of brain development is a factor often considered in whether to charge teens as adults in criminal activity, Kruse said.
“There’s no blanket statement that all kids of a certain age know this right from wrong but don’t know this right from wrong in all circumstances,” she said. “It has to be a case-by-case evaluation.”
Regardless of the age of the child or teen, Kruse said it is important for parents to monitor behaviors, how they interact with other children and how they’re interacting online to ensure there aren’t warning signs of problematic behavior.
“If you have concerns about your child’s behavior, whether it’s violent behavior, aggressive behavior or sexual behavior or someone else has raised that concern to you, it warrants seeking a medical evaluation or mental health evaluation of some kind,” Kruse said.
Ignoring warning signs — especially when pointed out by other adults, a medical professional or school officials — can be evidence used in civil lawsuits where negligent supervision by the parent is alleged. Gilles such lawsuits require proof that a parent has knowledge or should have had knowledge their child was a danger to others.
How often are parents criminally charged? ‘Almost never’
Dmitiry Shakhnevich, a Manhattan attorney and an adjunct assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Law at the City University of New York, said charging parents criminally for their child’s conduct is an anomaly.
“It’s going to be almost never,” he said. “It’s very hard to hold a passive wrongdoer liable, particularly in the criminal realm, unless there’s a real strong connection, a real strong set of evidence that they had a real reason to foresee this as being reasonable. If you have parents that just buy a child guns, that’s not nearly enough.”
In Michigan, the parents of the alleged high school shooter are charged with involuntary manslaughter after being accused of ignoring multiple warning signs that their son might be considering an act of violence and purchased him a firearm.
“Really the idea is you can’t criminalize accidental behavior,” Shakhnevich said. “What you criminalize is foreseeable behavior. You could hold a set of parents civilly responsible, but to charge them criminally would mean to imply that their mens rea, their state of mind, rose to a sufficient degree of seriousness.”