In some cases of teenage violence, parents have been held liable for related charges.

Parents can learn from research about red flag behaviors for potential future violence in kids.

With education comes protection for all parties.

At the end of May, a teenage girl allegedly stabbed three horses stabled at a barrel racing competition in Las Vegas. Caught on video, she was arrested. A judge decided she posed a danger to the public, so she remained in detention. She faces charges for willful or malicious killing, maiming or torturing an animal, and felony malicious destruction of property.

On social media, there was an immediate call for charging the girl’s parents as well. Some people acquainted with the suspect’s past behavior said there’d been signs of trouble.

What this girl allegedly did justifies outrage, but we need more clarity about when to hold parents accountable. Over the past few years, we’ve seen some cases in which parents have been convicted of negligence (and worse) when they ignored their child’s troubling behavioral signals.

In Michigan in 2021, Oxford High School officials told James and Jennifer Crumbley that their fifteen-year-old son, Ethan, appeared to be in crisis. They were asked to remove him from school. They refused. That day, he used a handgun to kill four students and injure six others and a teacher. The parents were both convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 10-15 years. It was the first time that parents had been held criminally responsible for their child’s mass school shooting.

The argument was that Ethan’s behavior presented red flags that his parents had ignored: He’d told his mother he’d seen demons, he’d drawn disturbing images at school that they knew about, and he’d been researching ammunition. Just three days before the attack, Jennifer had taken him to a shooting........

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