Children, although adorable, have a real specialty for destroying things and sometimes they destroy really expensive things. Take the child who used permanent marker all over the neighbor’s new quartz countertop or the child who rubbed slime all through an authentic Persian rug whilst on a playdate.
Paying for the damage caused by your little angel may be the right thing to do, but a legal obligation to do so only arises in certain circumstances.
The Legal Test
If your child breaks something valuable, the owner of the damaged item could potentially take legal action against you for not stopping your child from causing harm. This action is known as negligence for breach of duty to a third party.
To be successful in this action the owner must establish two things:
- The parent could have reasonably foreseen that the child would cause the damage or harm. The Court typically looks at whether the child usually wreaks havoc, or if the incident was entirely out of character when assessing this.
- The parent failed to take reasonable steps to ensure the child did not cause harm or damage.
“Help, where’s the brake?!”
In a 2018 Disputes Tribunal case a 13-year-old girl was waiting in her older sister’s car outside a pub when she decided she might try her hand at driving and consequently crashed into the wall at said pub.
The girls father paid the pub owners $500 upfront and set up a payment plan to pay for the rest of the balance. Unfortunately, the father became very sick, lost his job, and defaulted on the payment plan.
The pub owners then took the father to the Disputes Tribunal to recover the outstanding balance.
The Tribunal found that because this behavior was totally out of character for the 13-year-old who was a top student at her school, the harm was not reasonably foreseeable and therefore he was not legally obliged to pay for the damage.
The Tribunal was clear that while the father may have a moral obligation to pay back the pub owners, this was distinct from a legal obligation.
Conclusion
Parents do not have to pay for damage caused by their children just by virtue of being their parent. It is natural as a parent to feel a moral responsibility to make amends for any damage caused by your child, but parents will not be legally obliged to pay up unless it can be shown that they knew the harm/damage would eventuate, but failed to do anything about it.
