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| your husband is swiss and he is not weighing in on this?
we live in switzerland.
1. parents teach their children to handle their own lives. even in school the situation is between the child and the teacher not the teacher and the parent. the mother is simply following a swiss cultural moray by not approaching you on the phone directly. its for her son to solve with her support for him directly.
2. 13/14 are not young children. they are not 'on the playground' in a slide/swing/monkey bars sense. that they where having any sort of physical altercation at this age (and yes, pulling someone's jacket falls under physical altercation) is unacceptable.
3. if your child does any damage to anything or any one outside of your own home then you are responsible. accident or not. provoked or not. if your child decided to retaliate or initiate is irrelevant in this case. both the children seem to concur that your son damaged the jacket. either acceptably repair the damage or purchase a new jacket.
4. if you need to take it beyond what appears to be a simple truth and remedy - a damaged jacket needs to be either replaced or repaired. your son did the damaging. you are responsible for your son. he in turn is learning to be responsible for himself. may i suggest the following options (at least one already having been expressed in this thread)
- learning experience. let the boys sort it out themselves at school. let them both approach their teacher(s) administrator(s) together and ask for assistance in coming up with a remedy. both boys then living with the 'verdict' and the consequences of their individual actions. parents staying out of it unless a wallet needs to be opened.
- referee: contact your insurance company.
- mutual responsibility. get confirmation on the cost of the jacket (yes, not surprisingly jackets are expensive these days particularly if it was a ski/winter jacket and particularly in switzerland) if possible. put a price on your son's responsibility for the damage as a percentage of the cost. 50/50%? perhaps even have then sit down face to face and decide between them. pay the amount and then have your son work off the money to account for his responsibility in the matter. dishes? window washing? clean the garage? | |
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Excellent advice. THen the OP should do nothing until the children sort it out themselves.
Of course, I would not even talk to anyone until a police report for assault or battery (whatever you call it in this country) was filed as this is a learning experience.
As you say 13/14 year olds are responsible. Then the assaulting child can do jail time for GBH and the jacket damaging child can pay for the jacket. That sounds fair to me. That is what you are saying, Right?
Sounds to me like you are trying to justify a cultural bias. I have noticed that parents in this country pretend to "teach their children to be responsible," but it looks more to me like parents don't want to be responsible for their children's behaviour. I am not Swiss, and I tend to call a spade a spade. You know, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then...
And they say Americans don't want to be responsible for their actions. Sheesh!