I don't get this attitude. Sounds pretty great, these institutions you talk about! What happens to children these institutions care for 100%? Oh wait ...

https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820...

You're assuming blanket good intentions on part of institutions and schools. Does it really need to be said this is exceptional, rather than the norm? Here is a study that quantitatively compares really bad home situations to many forms of institutional care.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.97.5.1583

Here is a study that correlates the "help" given by institutions like schools with betterment or worsening of symptoms. And again, we see: beyond giving information to children ALL institutional help is worse than no help at all. So I wonder how you justify these good intentions? More institutional involvement makes lives of children worse, not better. (And yes, I get it, some problems evolve in dramatic fashion, and tend to worsen, such as anorexia. However, again, no institutional help has better outcomes. It's just no help results in a slowly worsening situation, institutional help results in a fast, dramatic worsening of the situation).

Therefore, I question why you criticize children and parents for refusing help. For the large majority of help provided this is the best choice for the child. Do people overreact? Yes, absolutely. Especially CPS is famous for "one wrong move, one second of trusting the wrong social worker, locked up for years" situations. It's almost funny, but these institutions are a recurring theme IN HORROR MOVIES.

I realize it's only one aspect of the problem you're identifying, but institutions, especially schools, really aren't good for children. Otherwise we'd see a lot of effort preventing this situation (and therefore a lot of tolerance for suboptimal home situations). Yet we see the reverse: defunding institutional care, defunding actual help, taking away information (talking with any social worker as a child can result in getting locked up for up to 27 years in New York, yes, really), fund 1000 new efforts for getting more kids into institutional care, because the kids never want to, not even when they are deep in abusive situations, and force everyone and everything to "report" kids for institutional care. I recently found an article that hairdressers are to watch for signs of child abuse.

Obviously that article never once mentioned just how bad the institutional alternative to "child abuse" situations is.

The arguments are that it's about "justice" (the many suggestions for punishing families, by "helping" the children (because criminal law makes touching the parents very hard) for example, for not vaccinating. Or for "disturbances". Or ...). Systematically we see the effects of this: youth crime is dropping like a stone. Crimes against children are dropping like a stone. And ever more kids are forced into institutional care.

Schools are a big part of that.

> As an adult I watch my local schools reach out to provide services, help of all kinds and struggle to find more than a handful of takers or folks who want to try…

As illustrated above, most social help programs at school are meant to trap kids and force them into institutional care. And if 1 school program has this intention, nobody will trust other efforts.

Besides, I don't get this attitude. In low primary school, perhaps this is true. But starting at something like 2nd-3rd grade the teachers, in my experience, are not sufficiently competent to effectively help children learn. And there's too many kids in a class to do it even if you do have the odd teacher that really does make a difference.

At home, kids can be taught by parents, and by a great many people on the internet. Pedagogical studies have always shown that parental teaching produces far better results (to the tune that some studies claim 1h of teaching by parents is roughly equivalent to ~14h of school, or 1h daily work by a parent makes kids advance far faster than in school). And, essentially all parents aren't incompetent and really care about their children.

And yes, there are bad and abusive parents. You know what is MUCH more common? Bad and abusive teachers (look up how many gym teachers are convicted for sexual assault yearly ...). Bad and abusive classmates is more common still (one UN study claimed 70% of kids have been victims of violence from classmates, done under teacher supervision. And whilst I'm not claiming teachers often cause or supervise violence, they are still failing to care for these children). And yet ... never is anything done about those teachers or schools.