What bothers me about the discussion about this in Europe is that it keeps focusing on how sorrowful and tough this system is ... ... on the people who work in

What bothers me about the discussion about this in Europe is that it keeps focusing on how sorrowful and tough this system is ... ... on the people who work in it. Not on the kids. They hardly get mentioned at all. The kids barely get mentioned at all. And of course, when the system abuses kids (including literally), the employees/bureaucrats are protected/shielded from consequences and the kids ? Sometimes it seems like half of them commit suicide. This is distressingly common thread in the stories about these people. Now I get it, stories only make it out if they're dramatic enough, but still. In the name of being "nice" to the kids they are locked up, excluded from schooling, imprisoned (including in solitary confinement for weeks), beaten ("pain impulses" is the psychological term), constantly moved around (so they don't have safety and predictability), and so on. Everything is done to prevent these kids from, even if they want to, get a normal life going. But you know who this is hard on ? The employees of youth services. That's who it's hard on. This has been going on for decades like this. The result is that most of the employees never even sees the kids. Everyone's working on figuring out what to do (without seeing the kids, of course), on dividing up the kids, on "influencing" the laws and advising government/parliament, on administrativa like processing request forms, on ... and the kids systematically aren't happy with their performance. And the saddest part is. These people are being judged against the lowest standards you can possibly imagine. These kids, most of them have been in youth services since 10 years old or less. They have never known differently, and so they accept the abuses of the system. Getting thrown out of their residence into the street every friday evening, because they can't pay for a weekend presence, then incarcerated by the police because they weren't back on monday morning ... Kids comment "that's inconvenient, I cried a bit", and move on in the conversation as if that's the most normal thing to have happen to you. Like this is hitting your head on a door. "Oh well". But even these kids judging these people by those sorts of extreme low standards ... aren't happy with the system, mostly because of the psychological safety issue: the kids can't predict what the youth services system will do to them in 2 months, and it's just 100% forced on them. So they can't plan, they can't compensate, they can't achieve anything, because it's just ripped away from them by someone they've never seen before 2 months down the line. Needless to say, the standards youth services uses to judge parents are getting ever stricter, and what they themselves do is ... remniscent of the stories we used to hear from Eastern Germans when I was young. Reality is that it's pretty damn clear that leaving a kid with alcohol addicted parents is a far superior option to putting the kid, even part time, into youth services.