Should an adult be allowed to physically move a stranger's misbehaving kid?

Is it okay for an adult to physically remove a stranger’s misbehaving child from an area, and deliver him/her to the people in charge?

This is inspired by a local news case here

In another piece on this story, the parents mentioned that they were considering contacting a lawyer. In the other story, Schmidl seemed to believe that the kid continued to hit pucks at him on purpose, after he asked him to stop, and claimed he was trying to take the kid to the people in charge of the rink.

** Is this guy in the wrong? ** Apparently, this kind of thing wasn’t frowned on in the past.

If he did do the wrong thing, does he deserve to be charged with anything?

What would you do if you were in the place of Schmidl? What would you do if you were the parent of the ten year old?

It’s assault. I’m sorry, the kid was being a brat, but he didn’t HAVE to drag the kid away; he could have waited longer and found someone in charge.

I am quite sure my kid will be a brat at some point, but I don’t want you touching her, either, unless it’s immediately necessary to save someone from serious injury. Wait and tell someone in charge. Once Schmidt had left the ice there wasn’t any pressing reason to go back and tough the kid.

I didn’t answer your last two questions:

  1. I would have left the ice with my child and found someone in charge and complained.

  2. I would have been absolutely furious with anyone who “Dragged” my kid off the ice in that situation. My kid would have been punished later. Mouthing off to adults is not acceptable.

You don’t think slap shots aimed at people is enough to cause “serious injury”?

Take his puck, take his stick. But don’t put your hands on someone else’s child.

Within limits, I have no objection to someone handling my son. The limits are thus: he must be doing something with injury potential, to him or to others, and he should only be restrained. It is my responsibility to mete out the punishment.

If someone grabs my son in deference to their child, however, we have a problem. I’m not a parent that thinks that my child can do no wrong- in fact, if he’s anything like I was he’ll be in the dock a good bit throughout his school career, and he’ll undoubtedly deserve most of it. But if he’s wrongly accused and wrongly restrained there will be hell to pay.

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** Is this guy in the wrong? **
If he did do the wrong thing, does he deserve to be charged with anything?

What would you do if you were in the place of Schmidl? What would you do if you were the parent of the ten year old?
[/QUOTE]

I think he had the right idea when he went to find a worker, instead of touching the boy. It’s definitely not smart to try and drag off someone else’s kid, and I can see why the mom called the police. Once everything was sorted out, I don’t think he really needed to be charged, and the parents’ idea of trying to get money out of this is going overboard.

So was the ten-year-old so skilled that he could aim slap shots at someone who wasn’t even on the ice? Read the link carefully.

It sounds like he was out of line going back and physically dragging the kid. However, he shouldn’t have been charged with anything and there certainly isn’t any lawsuit here with merit.

The OP cites another link where the man stated that he believed the kid was aiming the shots at him, especially after he asked the kid to stop.

Whether or not the kid is skilled enough to hit him on every shot is irrelevant to the issue of what the appropriate response should be to a 10 year-old who is purposely aiming at people, especially after being told not to do so.

One of the things the original story fails to emphasize is that the boy was aiming at Schmidl and Schmidl’s three year-old.

http://www.tonawanda-news.com/local/gnnlocalnews_story_103224204.html

Sorry, but I side with Schmidl on this. Were it my daughter that was shooting at other people while I wasn’t there, I’d hope to God that somebody would have enough moral courage to actually do something about it.

Taking a kid to the authorities is enough to get you an assault charge? Jesus fuggin’ wept.

If it were my kid, I’d slap the shit out of him and tell him to go apologize to Schmidl before I make the hockey stick disappear completely in his rear end.

Well, I may be exaggerating. But I used to be a judge for administrative matters (not a trial judge), and if a prosecutor had brought some shit like this in front of me, I would have thrown it right out. We all have a responsibility to take care of and control the youth in our society, even to the point of punishing them (if their parents aren’t around to do it), and so long as it’s done in a reasonable manner there is no way a responsible adult should get in trouble for that. We should encourage discipline, not chastise it - that kid needs to learn respect for other adults (if he behaves that way around other adults though, it’s likely he has little respect for his own parents anyhoo).

As I think I said, there are things that you can do to “do something about it” that don’t involve manhandling the kid. Take the stick; how hard is that?

How funny, that is also my local news - I just wasn’t in that mind set when I clicked on the link so it was one of those things where I couldn’t figure out why everything seemed so familiar.

Dragging is kind of weird, it seems like it could mean a range of things. Dragging, where the kid is sitting on the ground in protest, and being dragged along by an arm seems extreme. However, the mental image I got when reading the story was the old “marching you down to the principal’s office” where the adult is walking along side with one hand firmly on the child’s shoulder – that seems more reasonable to me.

Ethically, I have no problem with this guy’s actions, although in a more practical sense I’m a little surprised he would do that in this day and age when people are so happy to have reasons to sue.

That’s how I feel about it. The kid was being a brat and the guy was doing something about it without harming the kid. He just used poor judgement and should have known there are sue happy people out there just waiting for something like this to happen. If the kid was that much of a troublemaker and disrespected adults what kind of parent do you think he’d have?

Then you get arrested for theft (and assault, 'cause you still have to approach and manhandle the kid to wrestle the stick away from him/her). :wink:

I call the use of “dragged” into question as well. I guess a court will decide (hey, THAT’S worth some taxpayer money!) if the guy manhandled him or if he led him away. The kid was a known troublemaker? I’d sure as hell be asking the management why HE wasn’t banned before a problem like this arose. I’ll tell you one thing: If I were at an ice rink with a 5 year old and some asshole kid of 10 was shooting pucks at us, I’d probably be in jail too. I would have taken his stick AND marched him up to the service area and reported his behavior. Don’t like it, parents? Keep an eye on your kids and teach them to be respectful in the first place.

:mad:

That may not be legally assault, but it’s close enough for to me.

That’s bullshit.

**Is this guy in the wrong? **
I may have handled it differently, but no.

If he did do the wrong thing, does he deserve to be charged with anything?
N/A

What would you do if you were in the place of Schmidl? What would you do if you were the parent of the ten year old?
I would have asked the kid where his parents were and talk to them. If I was the parent, I would’ve apologized to the man and have had a word with my child about respect and just plain common sense (hockey pucks can be very dangerous).

I don’t have children so I can’t say if my opinion’s valid, but what a little shit. And what a bitch for pressing charges. (I hope that’s not too coarse for IMHO)

I have to start by saying that my own experience with the press has been such that I have some doubt that the events as they happened have much at all to do with the story as it was run. So I have no real feeling about whether he was in the wrong or not: the description seems to me to cover everything from removing a child from the ice to the edge of the ice to wait together for an official or his mother all the way up to lifting him by the scruff of his jacket and hauling him bodily across the area while uttering threats and imprecations. However, assuming the facts as they have been given (since the conversation really goes to shit when you start with “it probably wasn’t like that at all”):

Having just moved from a city of several million souls in the US to a much smaller place in the Netherlands, I am surprised to find myself saying: it depends. Here, I think I would not object if someone removed my child from the skating rink and handed them over to the nearest person-in-charge – at least I would not object to the action of the adult. In the city I left, I think I would object quite a lot. I am not even sure this makes sense but I find it is my feeling about it in considering the matter. My children now expect to be corrected, praised, patted on the head, and otherwise interacted with by the adults around them in a way they did not expect Stateside. And I think it has to do with the size of the city rather than its location, as they recently behaved in Utrecht exactly as they behave here, and I found I was much less comfortable about it in the larger city.

Right now, If I saw a ten year old doing that, I would almost certainly speak to him about it and in some circumstances might very well prevail upon him to go with me to somebody in charge, most likely his mother. But so far just speaking to the child has generally been enough for me. I would have to do it without dragging him because I am no larger than most ten year olds – at least in Holland, land of the giants – so physical intervention is not really a great idea. This has not yet been a problem. Even the most delinquent of ten year old juvenile delinquents is a ten year old and I can (thus far) dominate every ten year old I have encountered. Ten year olds do lots of dumb shit, it’s part of the job. And sometimes ten minutes later is too late, some things are best corrected right then.

But correcting is not the same as ordering around; ordering a ten year old boy around if he is with his friends and you are not his parent is likely to result in some kind of mouthing off or another it seems to me. Fire for fire, right? So I probably also would not tell him to stop it unless he were my charge for some reason, and if I did I would like to think I would not take the taunting of little children quite so personally. From the story, again, it looks as though the hockey puck shooting was not what caused the dragging; it was the taunting which did not seem to involve hockey pucks flying. So evidently the “stop it” worked, it just led to the next round. Still, acting like, um, like a mouthy and badly behaved ten year old is certainly infuriating but doesn’t seem to me to justify dragging the child anywhere.

Well, according to witnesses the kid was shooting hockey pucks at the man and his 3 year-old child, repeatedly hitting the man even after the kid had been called on it. So the “stop it” did not work.

Also, I don’t see how one can call the hockey pucks ancillary to what happened here - it’s the instigating event.