To think this is stealing?

[Dontgiveaflyingfuck]

Dd1 (9) had two siblings for a play date yesterday (9 and 10). My only rule is that my bedroom is out of bounds. I asked dd1 to fetch me my sewing kit from my room - what i later found out is one or both of the siblings followed her in and ate some of my sweets. Dd1 is autistic so cannot easily lie and rarely breaks rules so i believe her when she said she didn't touch anything.

I spoke to the other mum this morning and said i wasn't sure which of her kids had stolen but i thought she'd want to know. She laughed and said its not stealing just sweets. Surely going somewhere you are not allowed and removing something is stealing? Or AIBU? I'd be furious if it was mine! Fair enough a 2 year old but surely by 9 and 10 you should know what not to touch.

peng - well, political thought might not be the best place to look for ethics

I don't have one axe to grind here in favour of one system over another, I'm just pointing out that deontology is one amongst very many schools of ethical justification, and that there is more to many moral systems than rule-following. I'm also just laughing at the hopeless triviality of getting worked up over a child's theft of a sweetie. I mean, honestly, there ethical outrages out there in the world so shocking that it would only be a very strange person down a very weird internet rabbit-hole who couldn't see the lack of proportionality and perspective in some of the insistently virtual-signalling comments on this thread.

Well, in relation to this particular case, one possible one might be a consequentialist/hedonist argument that would say that the pleasure that the sweet gave to the child outweighs the pain of the OP being deprived of it and that there are really no wider social implications or harms in a one-off case where the harm is so slight. You could bring in some biological stuff about the intensity of sweet flavours to a young palate in support.

Or you could potentially argue that "thou shalt not steal" is a tenet of slave morality, a kind of bad faith that builds ethics on negativity and deprivation instead of positive freedoms, in a Nietzschean sense.

Or you could just argue that you have your knickers in a twist over something ridiculously minor and that it's socially ludicrous to treat this so seriously.

You asked me for any moral justification, not one that I thought was water-tight! Obviously, there are huge problems will all three schools of thought - deontology, consequentialism, Nietzschean genealogy.

My point is that rigidly saying "These are the moral rules, for all time" is disputable. Whole libraries have been written on the ins and outs, yet Mumsnet thinks it has the answers all pat.

And, to repeat, it's a child stealing a sweet. There are women being raped and abused, children dying of starvation or working long hours in sweatshops, all sorts of wrongs in the world that are crying out for condemnation yet Mumsnet has spent 17 pages condemning a child stealing a sweet.

I wouldn't let the children come to my house again

They'd be crushed, I'm sure!

The context is completely different, and in this case completely irrelevant Pengywn.
Can't believe there is so much abhorrence & debate over a child who has taken a sweet...

Yes Pengynn, but that is a different scenario altogether. Taking someone's car, unless otherwise agreed, is likely to involve an element of dishonest intent. But we are not talking about a car here, we are talking about a young child, eating a sweet that was lying around a play mate's house, which albeit was not offered or agreed, could hardly be said to amount to any semblance of dishonest intent.
So in that particular sense, it is an exaggeration of phrase for OP to refer to this as theft. Not exactly well mannered I agree, but theft?? No, absolutely not.

In this society, stealing is both illegal and widely considered harmful

Sure. But in this society, a child eating a sweet is not considered stealing.

I hate having kids round... once one of them sneezed and actually took a tissue, a super-soft scented one at that, without each so much as ‘please’. Who sends their children anywhere without a tissue in their pocket?

I'm sorry, I don't understand why you keep pressing an irrelevant analogy of taking a car, to the one we have here, which is a child eating a sweet?! Of course it makes a difference? Don't you think context has a place in law?
And aside from all this, if this said child is 9 years old, they are below the age of criminal responsibility in this country. So it doesn't matter how many analogies are used to compare, it still does not amount to any criminal definition of theft.

Not at all, I presume you have no legal background, or you would understand what I am saying. In itself, the item being appropriated, is not relevant. But in the context of proving dishonest intent, the appropriation of a sweet by a child, (who at 9 years old cannot be criminally responsible regardless) is most definitely not comparable to that of an individual taking a car without permission. It is not the car, or the sweet or whatever, it is the dishonest intent that is relevant here. And that I'm afraid, in the context of an impulsive eagerly eaten sweet, cannot be pinned on a 9 year old boy.

No one is saying this is a major event and the police should be called etc. What we are saying is that it is stealing, I’m not sure why people are arguing that it isn’t. It is stealing, the children were told not to go into the room and are old enough to understand that they took something and probably knew to keep quiet because they knew it was wrong. I know I did at a younger age, still stole biscuits and sweets but I knew it was wrong. The point is what they took was minor but it is still stealing. Just because sweets are usually offered as a sharing thing does not mean it isn’t stealing when taken without permission in a room you know you were allowed in.

ITs stealing as in taking without permission or invitation. To me, what is far ruder is the child entering your bedroom when you've specifically said that they should not. Your DD went because you asked her specifically to bring you something. The other child should not have followed.

But you can see from some of the responses here why some children are without boundaries, rude, no without a clear moral sense appropriate to age. They're taught to misbehave by their parents' lax ethical boundaries.

At 9 or 10, when a guest in someone else's house, a child is old enough, and should be well-mannered enough, to respect their host's clear rules and requests.

I think they all know it is stealing

Look, we all know now that you cannot comprehend the multiple explanations people have been kind enough to give you, and I'm sorry for you. But please don't tell other people what they think, especially when we have told you but you don't get it.
It's got pathetic now.

Pengwyyyn no no no. We do not all consider it to be stealing. Your child is welcome to come to my house and be a child and rifle through my sweet jars - yes I have one, but no one ever goes near it cos my kids aren't that bothered about sweets cos I've never hid them. I categorically don't consider taking sweets from a sweet jar on a play date stealing. You have a different code of ethics to live by but it's not mine and and its not countless of other posters on this thread.