Is it right to force your children to pay for their mistakes?

When you’re a teenager, everything seems so hugely consequential. Everything is turned up a million degrees, and it’s either bleak or technicolor. This can lead to some pretty interesting decisions. You can mess up pretty badly and end up paying the price for it. That is, if you have parents who hold you accountable for your actions. Which is what they should do. Part of good parenting is not letting your child off the hook. If they never suffer the consequences of their actions, then they will never learn right from wrong. It’s not always easy, though, in these moments, to let them experience the full breadth of it. 

When you do something as drastic as ruin a $6000 purse just because you were jealous, then you better be prepared to face the full consequences of that action. You may ask, «Why would a teenager have a purse that cost that much?» But you would be asking the wrong questions. What matters is that it was destroyed in an act of jealousy, and that is not a good behavior to encourage. No matter what problems you have in life, purposefully ruining someone’s stuff just to make them angry on a personal level just doesn’t make sense. It’s not how adults deal with their problems, and it isn’t how children should either. And if they do, they should learn to never do that again.