Carey, if you keep your only car keys on your person and your kid still manages to steal the car, it is obvious that it has been stolen and you as a parent are *not* liable for the damage because you did not *allow* the child to have the car. You weren't *negligent*----any and all liability rests on negligence. No negligence means no liability. No court is going to find that merely not shipping your kid off to private reform school constitutes negligence---unless you disobey a court order to put him/her in something or other.
And you can then file a police report and have your kid *prosecuted* for stealing the car and incarcerated by the state in a prison----which is much more humane and less damaging because at least prison *admits* to being a hostile place, doesn't demand to be able to dig around in your mind, and doesn't hire unqualified pseudo-shrinks to do the digging. Oh, and prisons don't stop you from writing letters to and receiving letters from your friends. And prisons have oversight to guarantee that you get minimally nutritionally adequate meals.
If it's a choice between your kid going in a "program" that stops his/her mail as a matter of routine (not by a licensed psychiatrist with dr/patient relationship, deciding *individually* under the ordinary legal and ethical strictures), and your kid hanging around and *maybe* going to jail if he screws up badly enough and breaks the laws-----pick jail. It's safer.
When I was a teen, the kids whose parents thought they were little angels were into a whole lot of stuff, and the kids whose parents thought they were into *everything* were frequently wrong and fruitloops to boot. The kid's peers usually were the ones who had an *accurate* read on what the kid was and was not into.
What I see is far too many ditzy fruitloop control freaks with more dollars than sense committing their kids for woefully insufficient reasons.
I want the laws changed. It should require a court order to commit a kid to a restrictive boarding school treatment center, and based on exactly the same criteria for involuntary commitment of an adult. Parental "consent" on behalf of the child should be insufficient---too high a percentage of these parents are fruitloops. All restrictive boarding schools should be required to be licensed as treatment centers and should be required to maintain the same patient files as any other mental institution that accepts involuntary commitments.
*Nobody* but the government should have the authority to place any individual in a residential penal institution (outside the home :smile:, and is not actually a mental hospital, it should be flatly illegal.
And I'm pretty darned confident that someday it will be.