Childish Behaviour

My grocery shop suffers considerably from children being allowed by their parents to "sample" sweets before they buy (or sometimes instead of buying!) or from children dirtying sweets and making them unsaleable.  Last week a young boy knocked a box of liquorice onto the floor: I asked the child's mother to pay for it, but she simply refused.  What are the Jewish ethics of the situation?

The issue of the extent to which parents can be expected to control their children, and to which they can be held liable for failure to do so, is of course a matter of considerable debate in English law and politics today.  Jewish law imposes considerable duties on parents to control their children and to guard them from situations in which they are likely to do damage.  Certainly in the case of children who are under barmitzvah or batmitzvah, and to some extent in the case of older children who are still living at home, parents have a responsibility which will sometimes be converted into liability to compensate those who have suffered from their failure to exercise proper control.  And in principle parents may be liable for thefts committed by their children. 

But shopkeepers and other business people have to accept full responsibility for the natural results of their marketing techniques and other arrangements.  For example, if you choose to put tempting arrays of sweets on display at child-eye height and within their arms' reach, in the hope that the children of your customers will become sufficiently excited to demand that their parents buy them sweets, you must accept the obviously foreseeable consequences, one of which is that children who are not yet old enough to know the difference between right and wrong will inevitably occasionally help themselves.  It would not be reasonable for parents to be made liable for thefts that you have in effect incited your customers' children to commit (assuming that they have not encouraged their children to "sample" your sweets - "sample" in this case simply being a euphemism for "steal"). 

Equally, if you choose to display unwrapped sweets because their cheapness or accessibility attracts custom, you must accept the commercial consequences, including the fact that damage caused without unreasonable lack of care on the part of your customers will often be significantly costly for you.

You are, of course, in the unhappy situation that the amounts of money involved in any particular case are likely to make it impracticable for you to seek redress of any kind against parents in any more formal way than by asking them to pay.  But in theory you are certainly right that in cases of theft or unreasonable carelessness by children the parents may be liable as a matter of Jewish law, provided that you have taken all reasonable steps not to incite the theft and to guard against the results of carelessness.