The only thing that will fix this is children's rights, enforceable separately from their parents' wishes.
Family court judges, in custody cases, have set all kinds of precedent for the kind of input kids are competent to make as to their own best interests, at various ages. That needs to be extended to making it a custody issue for family court whenever parents try to transfer care of their child to a facility for more than three weeks.
When parents transfer their child to a facility, they're admitting they cannot, at that time, care for that child--unless the facility is a strictly academic one.
This admission of inability should automatically trigger close scrutiny by social services and family courts.
Methinks the kinds of parents that send their kids to Programs frequently have parenting practices that would not stand up well to such scrutiny.
An example would be Joan Crawford sending Christina and her brother to ultra-strict "boarding school" in the middle of nowhere--basically a program---because Mommie Dearest had Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
I strongly suspect that a lot of these Program Parents are narcissists, or share many traits with narcissists.
It's glaring in the online "parent support" forums--it really is all about them.
Control freaks are, apparently, usually highly narcissistic.
Julie
