Parental Reactions to Bad Behavior

[StudentGirl]

Hi Everyone,

I'm really hoping that someone will be able to help me, although by looking at the age groups, I'm a little worried I may have the wrong age group.

Basically, I'm a law student, and I'm doing a presentation on how a child receiving a legal punishment (such as a reprimand or caution) affects the parent/child relationship. I've been googling, and looking through hundreds of journals, but the only thing I can find is about how having a parent in prison affects a child.

I appreciate that this can be an intensely personal issue, and that the forums are generally not used for this kind of request, but any help at all that can be given would be really gratefully received. So if you have experienced this yourself, or if you can just imagine how you would feel to find out that your children had been in trouble with the law, then any feedback at all that you can give me would be so helpful.

Thank you so much in advance!

I didn't experience this, but my parents did -- my brothers were mischievous teens and extremely self-destructive adults.

The high spirits hijinks petty mischief type stuff as teens my parents did forgive. But when things escalated years later to awful using (of people and substances) behaviour, the relationships suffered badly. My mom had to do the whole tough love route and send my brother to prison. . I'm pretty sure that my dad is leaving nothing to my brothers in his will (my brothers assume this, too).

Hi Student - I wonder if you don't get much of a response here - try "Parenting", as posts on Beh/Dev tend to be more about babies/toddlers.

You do sometimes hear of mothers who have lied for/sheltered their children who have committed crimes, but I do think the majority would go for the Tough Love approach. If I knew that my oldest (who's 22) had committed the sort of crime that warranted a prison sentence, I wouldn't protect him (assuming I was in a position to).

It wouldn't affect my love for him, though, and it wouldn't affect my support. And certainly for younger children/lesser crimes, nothing would change re our relationship, other than that I'd give them hell and wonder where I'd gone wrong.

But I suppose reactions would depend really on the nature of the crime - until you've been there you can't really know. God knows what the mothers of rapists and murderers go through.