When my friends and I were like 15 we went through a phase where any time we were walking home from someone's house late at night (usually drunk or after a party every weekend), we would take great pleasure in a number of drunken activities, including:
Diving in people's hedges/bushes
Running past cars and kicking the wing mirrors off
Running over cars
Stealing car badges
Stealing road signs or traffic cones
Stealing milk bottles left outside peoples' houses and throwing them up in the air as we ran down the road.
At the time, it was so, so fun. Like, can't breathe from laughing so much once we stopped running away. And when I think back on it now, I genuinely never really had a thought about how that would impact on people's lives, or the financial implications. It was just fun, and in our minds we weren't hurting anyone.
I never once really thought about the fact that someone would have to pay to repair their wing mirror, or how much that costs, or that what we were doing was technically criminal and that we could be caught, arrested, charged.
And now I'm 32. I own a home, have a family, a job that pays the bills and pays for the two cars we own.
Recently kids in our area have been going past cars parked on the street at night and casually throwing food on the cars, and - would you believe it - fucking around with wing mirrors as they go past. I got into my car in the morning and looked over to see my wing mirror had been bent backwards completely.
One of my cars has a dent in the roof. I have been woken up at night by drunken teenagers running past and making noises loud enough to know they either ran over the cars or threw things at them.
I also have a large hedgerow separating part of my property from the street, and I find bottles, wrappers, etc. pushed into the hedge all the time from kids walking past who just finished whatever they bought from the shop.
I was really pissed off that these shit head kids are not respecting people's property and damaging things that we worked hard for and paid for. In a way, I understand now that I was that shit head kid once, even though I also know at the time I was actually a good, innocent kid and had no bad or malicious intent towards anyone.
I will do my best to raise my kids in a way that they would hopefully respect people's property and not engage in stupid shit like that, but at the same time I think I would also understand if they did do stupid shit with their friends where the group mentality and fun of the situation prevents them from thinking it through properly. It won't make it right, and if I found out I think I would teach my son a lesson by taking him to the owner of the property to apologise and make him work to pay for it or something.