When Your Son Crashes the (Very Expensive) Car

Peter Cheney reviews automobiles for The Toronto Globe and Mail. His 18-year-old son, Will, thinks that’s a pretty cool job, and often brings his friends to the family garage to check out the loaner car his dad is reviewing next.

Most recently, the car in question was a Porsche Turbo, an $180,000 model that Peter Cheney describes as one that “every driving aficionado and pension raider dreams of – 500 horsepower, leather-lined cockpit and a 330 km/h top end. Like a tiger in an Armani suit – killer chassis, unbeatable power, but suave and comfortable, too.

But when Will made a visit to the garage with a friend, things went more than a little wrong. As his father wrote in a column last week, Will turned the Porsche’s key, figuring he’d check out the stereo system and maybe gun the engine a bit.Instead, the car, which is capable of going from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds, jumped forward, then tore through the garage door. There was $11,000 in damage to the Porsche and an additional $2,500 charge to repair the house. At first Peter’s problems were logistical — finding someone to secure the structure by nightfall, contacting Porsche and breaking the news. But “as the dust settled,” he writes:

… my wife and I confronted the parenting issues that attended the disaster. What was the appropriate punishment for a boy who trashes a car worth $180,000? Friends were flooding us with stories of costly child screw-ups — like the son who flushed an action figure down a toilet, creating a deluge that caused more than $100,000 damage to their house. A colleague told me how she damaged her parents’ brand-new van – she got distracted and rear-ended a truck filled with huge stones (driven by two women who were starting a rock garden project).

I recalled a childhood friend who rolled a bowling ball off a garage roof (it seemed like a good idea at the time), only to have it land on his father’s newly restored Porsche 356. Another had totaled the family Mercedes by taking it out of gear and pulling off the handbrake – he jumped out as the car began to roll, and watched helplessly as it headed down their steeply sloped driveway, across the street and into a ravine.

We had a hard call to make. Would it be grounding for life? Let it go? Something in between?

Good question. How do you decide to punish a child when something goes unintentionally and expensively wrong? Should the punishment depend on the damage done? Or the carelessness shown? What would you have done to Will under the circumstances? To read what Peter did, go here. But here’s a hint: he was influenced, he says, by this story about Frank Sinatra:

When Frank’s daughter Nancy was young, she hosted a party at his house. On a table was a pair of priceless crystal birds. Suddenly there was a crash, and the room fell silent – one of Nancy’s friends had knocked one of the birds off the table, destroying it.

All eyes turned to Sinatra, the legendary Chairman of the Board. Sinatra stood silent for a moment. Then he swept the second bird off the table with the back of his hand. It exploded on the floor like a high-priced crystal grenade.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sinatra announced.