Parental Liability

Ellen Goodman (Commentary, April 30) does her best to explain that parents aren’t responsible for the actions of their children--even in the horrific aftermath of Littleton. That you can be a great parent and somehow not know that your children--arrested the year previous for breaking into a car and stealing electronic equipment, remember?--are into bomb making and Nazi philosophy. Well, we already know that the teenagers themselves aren’t to blame--it happened because of too many loose guns lying around and movies like “The Matrix.” Goodman even temporizes by pointing out, “I also remember what my parents knew of my inner life at 17--absolutely nothing.” I guess that talking to your children, being part of their lives, being a family, is a bit too much to take on today.

Goodman writes: “Tell me what punishment the law can administer that’s greater than a life sentence of pain for families who will forever ask themselves, ‘Why?’ ” The parents of the completely innocent children that these two twisted monsters gunned down get to go through far worse, every day. The survivors who lived through it (and relive it in nightmares daily, I’m certain) go through far worse.

MARK MARTIN

Eagle Rock

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I have to respond to the April 30 article concerning parental liability for children’s crimes, especially the very last quote by Howard Davidson, “Do we want to promote parents being snoops and informers against their kids?”

Absolutely, we do! I was not a stay-at-home mom--I’m an RN and I worked while my kids were growing up. But I sure as heck knew what was in their rooms and with whom they were associating. I remember particularly one set of little delinquents who lived in our neighborhood. I watched for a while and then told my kids that these children were personae non grata in our home and they were not to associate with them.

You can’t start when the kids are in middle school--you start when they are crawling and teach them “No!” You don’t abandon your responsibilities once they get older--our kids drove their own cars, registered in our names. Guess who had control of the car keys? Guess whose kids only had one traffic ticket?

KATE REEVES

Fullerton