Certainly, the mother did the right thing. But before I award any medals to her, I'd want to know how it is that she has managed to raise 2 teenage sons who are both apparently oblivious to the essential wrongness of committing crime. I don't expect kids to behave perfectly, but robbery is not just a case of juvenile shenanigans.

Yes, this brain rewiring that happens in puberty takes its tolls...

Jul 8, 2011 -- 6:15AM, Ebon wrote:

Where I grew up, shoplifting was a fairly normal rite of passage to be part of the "in crowd".

Teenagers are going through a fairly important psychological process of establishing their own identity as seperate from their parents and minor brushes with the law are a fairly normal part of that. You commit some minor crime like shoplifting or underage drinking or motorcycling without a helmet (helmets are mandatory here), get slapped on the wrist and learn your lesson from it.

That said, full-blown robbery goes rather beyond the normal teenage "testing the limits" behaviour.

Well, when I was growing up (and, in my area, even now) shoplifting consisted of grabbing a couple of small items, shoving them in your pocket, and casually sauntering out of the store.  If my parents had caught me at something like that, I don't think they would have called the cops, but they would have made me take the items back to the store, pay for them,  and apologize to the manager.  That would have been humiliating enough.

But what was shown in the video is in a different category altogether. 

High fives to the parents that took their kids to the police after seeing them on that video!  Those kids are going to learn that stupid decisions can have serious consequences and that's a lesson we can all use a refresher course on.