Opening the door to find a police officer who wants to have a word with your teenager can be worrying as a parent. You likely know straight away that it is not going to be good news.
If the police decide to charge your child with a crime, you may wonder what went wrong. How did the child you did your best to raise as an upstanding citizen end up facing criminal charges?
Their friends could be partly to blame
One of your first thoughts might be to blame the crowd your child hangs around with. Perhaps you even warned your child that those people were bad news. Research has shown that you might be right. Hanging around with the wrong crowd can make it more likely for a teenager to commit a crime. There are a couple of reasons for this:
- Normalization: What is seen as normal by one group of people may not be seen as normal by another set. For instance, in some social groups, it is normal to spend $300 on a pair of sneakers, while other groups would consider that abnormal. If the crowd your child hangs around with considers it normal to shoplift, race cars or get into fights, then your child might also start to consider it normal, even though it would never be considered normal in your household.
- The desire for acceptance: Teenagers are at a point in their lives where they are looking for acceptance. They want to be part of a group. Sometimes the way into that group is to do something very different from what they were brought up to do. It might be that someone in the group tells them to carry out a particular act if they want to be accepted as a member of the group. Or it might be the child does it because they think it will get them accepted without anyone actually prompting them to do it. Either way, the reason they do the thing, is to try and be accepted in the group.
A court is unlikely to excuse your child altogether if they committed a crime because of these reasons. But it may be willing to be lenient. Getting help to examine the defense options will be crucial.