[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published October 26, 2026] ©2026
OK, I realize that I sound like the senior citizen that I am way more than the newspaper probably likes. In fact, I remember when the Light hired me back in 2009 to write this column, the then-editor lamented, “If only you were thirty years younger!” She’s probably dead now but I’ve confirmed her point.
So here’s my Medicare-demographic perspective on teen behavior, curmudgeon edition. I confess that I have been appalled by the Ring camera footage posted by homeowners showing teens violently kicking front doors at 2 a.m. then running away laughing. As a senior citizen, that would give me a heart attack. How would I know that it’s not a home invasion robbery? In some cases, the doors are actually damaged. The kids aren’t even afraid of having their faces shown. They think this is hilarious.
But it’s the responses of way too many people to these posts that really scares me. Lots of “lighten up – it’s just kids being kids” (always posted by a guy.) Or: “people should never post the face of a minor on Next Door.”
Um, excuse me. They were committing a crime (vandalism, trespass).
I would be pressing charges so fast their little heads would spin.
And please, post their faces! Let there be at least some hope that their parents will see it and care enough.
There is nothing “kids will be kids” about pounding on or aggressively kicking someone’s front door in the middle of the night. You are terrorizing people. Would your parents be saying, “Oh, it’s just some fun-loving neighborhood kids at it again?”
If this were one of my kids, I’d really want to know. And they’d be back at the home owners’ door with profuse apologies and ready to make restitution.
Our legal system wisely recognizes that brain development in humans is an on-going process and that judgment is a work in progress in teenagers. Hence a different system for juveniles, and sealed records so that youthful transgressions do not haunt people for their whole lives.
But it would seem that the point of that is it would give kids an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Not just get off the hook.
It is no accident that this column is coming out right before Halloween, the yearly celebration of Group Stupidity. Please note that I love Halloween. We get tons of adorable Trick or Treaters who tend to be unfailingly polite and charming.
Certain groups of teens are another matter. Lots of kids who would never engage in vandalism suffer a collective failure of conscience on this night. I’ve watched it for decades in my Halloween-centric neighborhood.
Alas, a teen fun favorite that also seems to increase a lot around Halloween is hurling eggs at the windshields of passing cars on La Jolla Boulevard. This could so easily cause an accident. Lobbing eggs at pedestrians from cars always sees an uptick as well.
I failed in a hundred ways with my kids. If you asked them what my worst mistakes were, they’d reply, “Alphabetically or chronologically?” But the one thing I feel I did right – a legacy of my own parents – was to make them take responsibility – and consequences – for their actions.
“I was there but I was just watching” would never fly in my house. Sadly it’s a defense that I’ve heard endlessly the day after Halloween from kids who I recognized who had vandalized my street. Their parents assured me that they believed the kid’s version of events, and if he wasn’t actually “doing anything,” (believe me, he was), he was innocent. It still makes me incredulous.
The felony murder rule applied in my house: if you were there, you were guilty.
For years, I could count on having to wash the egg off my car (no garage) before going to work (it really messes with the paint job), sweeping up my dumped-out trash from the street, and hoping the paint from paint pellet guns would eventually wear off my siding.
I’m actually fine with “kids being kids” on Halloween if they or they and/or their parents want to come clean it up afterwards. But intrinsic in that phrase, someone other than the fun-loving kid gets to deal with it.
I always felt really lucky that, unlike some of my neighbors, my car windows weren’t broken, my brick retaining wall hadn’t been pushed over, and nobody had spray-painted black graffiti on $20,000 worth of custom cabinets recently installed on a nearby house being remodeled. Such little devils!
I confess that my childhood sense of justice was honed on a steady diet of Nancy Drew books. The whole River Heights Police Department sprang into action when Nancy’s rosebushes were stolen. When she called “the authorities,” not only did they quickly apprehend the bad guys, but they locked them up forever. No habeas corpus, but you can’t have everything.
In the early days of the pandemic, I witnessed on several occasions groups of teens rushing into my local CVS, grabbing all the alcohol they could carry, and rushing out again. (Those imps!) People wanted to say that those kids must have been from out of the area, but unless that area was Rancho Santa Fe, I’m guessing that the late-model Range Rover they climbed into at the curb probably came from La Jolla.
No one’s looking to incarcerate these kids. But before your 18th birthday is a really good time to learn that laws (at least theoretically) apply to you. Not learning this, as some local kids famously later learned, means you might do some serious time in an adult penal institution, where kids are not being kids.
Please, if your teen gets apprehended for some infraction, don’t make your first step be to call a lawyer. Let them do community service. Hopefully a lot of community service. It’s the biggest gift you can give them.
I recently read this quote that I absolutely agree with: “If you do not allow people to experience the consequences of their actions, you will always be a safe space for their worst behavior.”
Halloween is fast approaching. Fortunately, our neighborhood now has a strong police presence on that night so the outright destruction is way down. But it still happens. So if you’re going to send me an email insisting it’s just “kids being kids,” could you include your phone number so my neighbors and I can call you to come clean up?
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