So I have a bunch of home automation projects I’ve been tinkering with weather related. One of which is an air quality sensor that determines when the air quality is bad with the intention of displaying some visual notifications around the house. I’ve been working on the coding for it and currently have it sitting on my desk in my home office. My most recent addition to it was having it graphing the data out to a webpage on my home network so I could see the change over time. The day I finished it and started testing was the day before Thanksgiving, my niece, 14 years old, decided she wanted to spend the night to hang out with her cousin, my son, since her mom and dad were coming over for Thanksgiving the next day anyways.
My home office is also our guest room, so the bed she sleeps in is in there. She went to bed about 10, I went downstairs to play some video games and have a couple of beers. I finally went to bed about 1 am, when I walked passed her room, I could hear her talking on the phone.
Next morning comes and after everyone is up and moving I decided to check on my air quality sensor and see how the data looked on the graph. As soon as I pulled up, something was really suspicious. It was basically a flat line with values between 1 and 5 most of the time, but at 1:05 am and 1:15 am it spiked twice to ~150. I took me a few seconds to put 1 and 1 together… “the only time I’ve ever seen it get that high was when food was cooking and there was smoke coming off the stove”… ohhhhhhhhhh.
I called her into the room and showed her the paper and told her, “The only reason these numbers would show like this is there was some kind of smoke in the room”. She said, “I don’t smoke”. I said, “Or something like a vape pen.” Her face went white, “Are you going to tell my mom?” “No, but you need to give me the vape pen”. So now I have a vape pen.
Not advocating being a “narc”.
I’m advocating not telling the kid you will keep it a secret from the parents (one of which is your sibling) in the first place. I’m advocating being chill about it. Take the vape away but don’t get hysterical about it. Give the vape and the info to the people who are responsible to make the decisions for their minor child. State only once your position. (e.g. no vaping or breaking the law on my watch and consequences are x). What if she was your neighbor’s child? Would you take the same approach? Is it right to not take the same approach? All questions you must answer for yourself to match your morals and ethical code.
Lots of hard decisions here and we don’t have the benefit of knowing why they were made.
https://www.vapingcricket.com/legal-age-to-vape/
Said kid decides to do it in your home possibly subjecting you to aiding/abetting or contributing to delinquency of minor charges if it ever gets to law enforcement.
You choose to withhold this information from law enforcement. I might as well but means vape provider goes unpunished. (Compounds your risk if this goes sideways later. Still, handle it in the family if you can. It’s a “victimless” crime.)
You choose to withhold this information from the parents of the child. You are deciding your judgement is superior to theirs. Perhaps you have your reasons, but you are cutting them out and this may go poorly for all if it comes out later. (“But mom/dad! Uncle OP just let me off with losing the vape last time! I hate you!” Ooooops)
You have chosen to seize the illicit property from the child and dispose of it yourself. So kid learns that you will allow them to get away with things relatively unscathed and tell no one.
Effectively no punishment/repercussions so hopefully kid needs little guidance to get back “on the right path”. Again, deciding your judgement is superior to her parents.
I would handle this differently, but I’m not there so just trying to share my opinion and maybe sway others to a better decision in future as OP’s has already been made and would be very unpleasant to undo now.