Should They Pay for What They Broke?

Type this question into a search box and most of page one is car accidents, written by personal injury lawyers. That is a real subject and it is not this one. This page is about the television, the door and the wall, broken at home, by your own kid.

What is paying for, exactly?

It is for closing the event, which is more than it sounds. An unpaid cost does not sit still. It turns up in the next argument as evidence. Money moving, in an agreed amount, on an agreed day, ending on a known date, is the only mechanism most households have for saying a thing is finished, and it gives your teenager a way out that is not an apology.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, writing in December 2017 about the goals of treatment for aggressive behaviour, lists helping a child to “be responsible for his/her actions; and accept consequences”. That is an aim, not evidence that a repayment plan gets you there.

Is it a punishment, then?

No, and the difference is not a word game. A punishment is designed to be felt. An amount set high enough to hurt is doing something other than repairing a door, and your teenager will read it correctly as a fine.

It is not absolution either. A parent who takes the money and stays angry has charged twice. If the payment closes the matter, then when it is done it is done, and it is not mentioned again in June.

When does making them pay work?

When four things are true, and almost never when one is missing.

• The amount is fixed before the first payment, and never revised upward.
• The rate finishes the whole thing in weeks rather than in a school year.
• It is written down, where both of you can see it.
• It has an end date, said out loud at the start.

Those four have their own page at making a repayment actually stick, because that is where most of these fall over.

When does it backfire?

When the total is open ended. Nobody prices the repair, the sum floats, and every week it feels larger to one of you and smaller to the other.

When the full replacement cost is charged for something no teenager could earn. A nine hundred dollar phone against a fifteen year old with no job stops being about the phone by about week three.

When the debt becomes leverage. Once “you still owe me for the door” has appeared in an argument about a curfew, the money has changed jobs.

When it is the only thing that happens. If nothing is ever said about the ten minutes before the door went in, the household has priced the damage and learned nothing from it. That conversation is at my teenager punched a hole in the wall.

How much is proportionate?

There is no published norm for this, in our sources or anywhere we could find, and a percentage would be a made-up number dressed as guidance. Three questions instead. Can it be finished inside about eight weeks at a rate they can meet? Does it leave them with something, given that a teenager who is bankrupt for the term has no stake in anything? And is it fixed, so nobody is doing arithmetic during an argument?

A share rather than the whole is the usual landing place.

What if they have no money and no way to get any?

Then do not build a plan that depends on money appearing. This is the commonest way these arrangements die: a figure agreed on the strength of a job that does not exist yet. The rules on what hours a fifteen or sixteen year old may legally work are federal and state both, so check before you build anything around a payslip. In the meantime, the answer is hours.

Is labour better than cash?

Often, for a reason that is easy to miss: hours cannot be quietly funded by you. Money out of an allowance you pay is a transfer from your left hand to your right. It closes the event, but the teenager has not done anything. Two hours of hauling or scrubbing is something they did, and the doing is most of what makes it feel over.

Three rules keep labour from festering. Agree an hourly rate and write it down, so hours convert into money and the total visibly falls. Use real work, since invented drudgery reads as humiliation. And keep it separate from the chores everyone already does. The repayment planner does the arithmetic for cash and hours together, including the finish date.

Can I claim it on the homeowners insurance?

We cannot tell you, and neither can anybody who has not read your policy. Cover varies by insurer, by form and by state, and this site has no verified source describing what a standard policy does with a breakage inside the house. The answer sitting on page one of most searches is somebody describing their own policy on a question-and-answer site, which is not yours.

Start with arithmetic rather than a phone call. Find the repair cost, then your deductible on the declarations page. If the repair costs less than the deductible, the question has answered itself. If it is larger, read the exclusions section of your own policy, then ask your insurer three plain questions, in writing where you can: does a loss of this kind fall under this policy at all, what would I receive after the deductible, and what happens at renewal if I claim. Either way, keep it out of the conversation with your teenager. Whether a company pays is a question about a contract you signed.

Am I legally liable for what they broke?

For your own belongings this is not a legal question. Nobody is going to make you pay yourself.

If the broken thing belonged to somebody else it becomes one, and it is a fifty-state question. Every state has its own parental responsibility statute, and they differ on the ages covered, on what acts count, and on whether there is a cap. The survey linked in the sources sets it out state by state. Read your own state’s entry, and if real money or a demand letter is involved, ask a lawyer licensed there rather than a website.

If police were involved, that is a separate track, and the useful thing to know is that most contacts do not become court cases. The federal description of the process warns that “even within States, case processing often varies from community to community depending on local practice and tradition”.

What this looks like in an ordinary house

Franco is sixteen and has put a foot through the lower panel of an interior door. This is an illustration rather than a real family.

His father gets one quote: two hundred and forty dollars including fitting. He decides before saying anything that Franco’s share is a hundred and twenty, because a hundred and twenty is finishable and two hundred and forty is not.

He raises it on Saturday morning rather than Thursday night, and it takes four minutes. Fifteen dollars a week: ten out of what Franco already gets, five for an hour of clearing the garage. Eight payments, ending on the twentieth. Franco argues that the panel was already cracked, and his father says the figure is the figure rather than arguing back.

They write it on an index card taped inside a cupboard, with a box against each of the eight dates, and the door gets fixed that week rather than left as a monument. On the twentieth the card goes in the bin.

And then the mechanics

Agreeing that they should pay is the small part. Whether the arrangement is alive in three weeks is the rest, and many are not, for structural rather than personal reasons. That is making a repayment actually stick. If nothing you take away lands any more, that is when grounding has stopped working.

One safety note. If there is any real chance that raising the money turns into a physical confrontation tonight, do not raise it tonight, and read what to do while it is happening. Everything here assumes a conversation that is safe to have.