When is stealing ok

In treating a child who steals persistently, a mental health provider will evaluate the underlying reasons for the child's need to steal, and develop a plan of treatment. Important parts of treatment can be helping the child form trusting relationships and helping the family to direct the child toward a healthier path of development. Your support will help us continue to produce and distribute Facts for Families , as well as other vital mental health information, free of charge.

You may also mail in your contribution. Box , Washington, DC The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry AACAP represents over 9, child and adolescent psychiatrists who are physicians with at least five years of additional training beyond medical school in general adult and child and adolescent psychiatry.

Hard copies of Facts sheets may be reproduced for personal or educational use without written permission, but cannot be included in material presented for sale or profit. Facts sheets may not be reproduced, duplicated or posted on any other website without written consent from AACAP. Stealing in Children and Adolescents. Return to Table of Contents. But stealing with aggression and violence is much more problematic and needs to be dealt with aggressively. This has to be taught with patience and firmness.

Labeling, yelling and name-calling does not change the behavior. For young children, a consequence might be that they go to their room with the door open for 15 minutes, at the end of which time you come in and talk with them about stealing. Focus on the child realizing he was wrong, instead of just saying he is sorry. As kids get older, other consequences come into play, like paying rent for the stolen property, paying back the stolen money, and loss of social privileges.

Volume and frequency of the stealing are also important to address. If a pre-adolescent or adolescent steals a large amount of money, which is measured compared to what the family has, the police should be called and you should be starting the legal process. This is designed to hold that child legally responsible, not only family-responsible. Stealing is a crime. These acts should be looked at as criminal acts more than as mental health problems.

While mental health issues may be involved, adults who have mental health problems are punished for stealing just like adults without mental health problems. Prisons and correctional institutions are full of people with mental health problems who also stole. But make no bones about it, they also need to be held accountable in the home as well as outside of the home for their antisocial behavior.

Although stealing may be a symptom of a larger problem, it is still stealing. The lesson about not stealing has to be reinforced and the child has to be held accountable. Excusing stealing will not produce that person. Sometimes parents minimize this behavior and it comes back to hurt them later on. The sense of betrayal that parents feel after their child has stolen from them is very real and should be addressed openly. As kids get older and become teens, I think that their loyalties and allegiances are torn between the values of their peer group and the values of their family.

And one of the ways that teens do that is by pushing their parents away and by rebelling against family norms and values. A certain amount of rebelliousness should be tolerated. Nonetheless, a teenager stealing from parents is not an act of rebelliousness. If there are several acts of stealing, they should be dealt with sternly in the family, using the behavioral concepts that I mentioned earlier.

If there is major stealing of money and other valuables, the parents should consider involving the police and pressing charges. Although this seems harsh, the principles behind it are easy to understand. When I have gone to youth detention centers to talk to the teens I was working with about the crimes that got them there, they invariably had a justification for it.

In short, teens develop a way of thinking to justify their teenage behavior. They develop an alibi for everything. Parents who insulate kids from the consequences of their behavior are only extending, supporting and reinforcing the bad judgments that lead to those behaviors.

The way trust is won back: for younger kids, they should be told what to do in order for the family to feel like they trust them again. Consequences make them uncomfortable. Consequences are designed to make the child thirsty.

In addition, positive statements about trust should be made frequently with younger kids. I know I can trust you downstairs with the TV. I know I can trust you to go into my bedroom. But always give them a means to earn that trust back, either in that conversation or a subsequent one. And when they do, they need to be held strictly accountable. I truly empathize with what parents are up against these days.

The concept of right and wrong has taken a real beating in our recent history. Or his father is an alcoholic. And they keep making those excuses until the kid is in serious trouble. Things like developmental stages or mental health diagnoses or family influences have to be dealt with as separate issues from the stealing or aggression. Do these issues need to be addressed? Of course they do. Are they significant? Should they be allowed to justify stealing or aggression?

Having had severe behavioral problems himself as a child, he was inspired to focus on behavioral management professionally. For the intuitionist, the non-natural property of goodness will make some of our moral claims regarding stealing true. The moral error theorist may have a non-moral reason for opposing stealing on many occasions, or indeed supporting stealing on other occasions.

Moral error theorists who care about the property rights of others, for example, may well strongly oppose stealing. However, if we adopt Prescriptivism, we might at least be able to criticise the thief for inconsistency if she speaks of the general wrongness of stealing whilst defending the rightness of stealing in her case. Despite this, one big worry for those interested in adopting a view like Emotivism or Prescriptivism is that it cheapens and eliminates the value of moral debate over the moral rightness of stealing, since we cannot defend our ethical claims as being genuinely true or false in the way that realist seeks to do and in the way that most people would wish to.

SUMMARY Many will want to avoid an absolute moral view regarding the unacceptability of stealing, the kind of view that Kant might be thought to defend.

Neither Utilitarianism nor Virtue Ethics offer an absolute prohibition against stealing, but each has their own problems. In terms of showing your understanding of these issues, applying normative theories to your own variety of cases is a tactic that may best enable you to write with confidence about the various nuanced issues afflicting each theory. Leon, K. Mill, J. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. Creative Commons - Attribution 4. Check if your institution has already acquired this book: authentification to OpenEdition Freemium for Books.

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