Essay for CAE
Parents should be punished for offences committed by their children.
Nowadays hardly a week goes by without another report of some crime appearing in the media. What is more, the amount of youngsters under fifteen who break the law is growing rapidly. In terms of this, the issue of whether parents should receive punishment for offences committed by their children assumes ever greater importance.
No one will dispute that one of the main features of this problem is responsibility. By punishing parents for what their children have done, the society pursues the aim of increasing parental responsibility. Admittedly, it cannot be denied that a parent feeling responsibility for his child’s deeds is likely to pass the notion of such words as duty, honor, good, evil and explain that every action will result in specific consequences. The other side of a coin is, however, that nobody knows for sure if the perspective of being punished will cause the increase in parents’ awareness of their great role in bringing up a law-abiding person or will simply provoke the fear of being punished. And it is well-known that actions did by a person whose main motivation is fear will conceivably do a lot of harm. For instance, the parents who are fearful of punishment could try to get rid of this feeling through violence towards their children, which will cause good neither for their descendants nor for society.
Another aspect we must bear in our mind is the age of children and the appropriateness of the punishment. It is obvious that there is no use in penalizing parents of the criminals who are over twenty-five. Moreover, the great majority of parents will certainly give themselves a severe punishment for fostering a person who can break a law. It is my firm belief that feeling of guilty and taking sore responsibility for their children’s illegal actions might be far stricter than any fine or restriction of freedom.
To draw the conclusion, I must say that this statement is open to
Nowadays hardly a week goes by without another report of some crime appearing in the media. What is more, the amount of youngsters under fifteen who break the law is growing rapidly. In terms of this, the issue of whether parents should receive punishment for offences committed by their children assumes ever greater importance.
No one will dispute that one of the main features of this problem is responsibility. By punishing parents for what their children have done, the society pursues the aim of increasing parental responsibility. Admittedly, it cannot be denied that a parent feeling responsibility for his child’s deeds is likely to pass the notion of such words as duty, honor, good, evil and explain that every action will result in specific consequences. The other side of a coin is, however, that nobody knows for sure if the perspective of being punished will cause the increase in parents’ awareness of their great role in bringing up a law-abiding person or will simply provoke the fear of being punished. And it is well-known that actions did by a person whose main motivation is fear will conceivably do a lot of harm. For instance, the parents who are fearful of punishment could try to get rid of this feeling through violence towards their children, which will cause good neither for their descendants nor for society.
Another aspect we must bear in our mind is the age of children and the appropriateness of the punishment. It is obvious that there is no use in penalizing parents of the criminals who are over twenty-five. Moreover, the great majority of parents will certainly give themselves a severe punishment for fostering a person who can break a law. It is my firm belief that feeling of guilty and taking sore responsibility for their children’s illegal actions might be far stricter than any fine or restriction of freedom.
To draw the conclusion, I must say that this statement is open to