Anecdotally, a bank once refused to open accounts for my kids, so I later researched the situation and found that there was absolutely nothing I could do about

Anecdotally, a bank once refused to open accounts for my kids, so I later researched the situation and found that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. If you are refused a new account at every bank, you have no recourse via the law. You're just unbanked, and then business models exist to extract money from you to provide extremely limited access to the banking system, using extortionate fees.