See my last response in Part 1.

What better environment is waiting outside of the nuclear family for children in not-so-great families?

Lack of imagination and lack of willingness to look too far beyond the type of system they know and prefer is one of the hallmarks of mainstream thinkers.

As youth liberationists have often discussed, one viable alternative to the nuclear family unit would be community living arrangements where kids in such dwelling complexes--similar to Sudbury campuses, but with more residential units--could not only look after each other, but would have older kids and adults both in residence and on staff who were hired to provide meals, medical care as needed, and support of every sort as needed. Residents of all ages would together formulate the rules of the complex, and it has been shown that kids tend to respect and follow rules they have a hand in formulating and which actually work for them more than rules that are imposed on them "for their own good" but which actually only benefit the adults who control them. There would be a choice of several of these in every city or town.

Work opportunities would also be provided there for kids to earn both a living and the equivalent of room and board rather than paying rent. There would be plenty of creative ways for them to earn their keep, and educational facilities would be connected to these complexes. Here they would enjoy full access to information provided by the Internet and the libraries of the educational facility, would not be forced to practice the religion of their parents, and would not be forced not to associate with groups (whether ethnic or otherwise) that their parents disliked.

Other alternatives would be living with other relatives they got along with better, as well as extended family units as practiced in other cultures which they may find themselves comfortable in.

One barometer is how many foster families are available for troubled or special-needs children. I think the supply of high-quality situations is severely limited.

We aren't talking about foster families only, especially families that the kids are forced to move into by social workers who are agents of the state. If kids themselves had a voice in how society is run, there would likely be many alternative opportunities available, since they would insist that resources be allocated to provide such opportunities. A major problem you are inadvertently making clear in this discussion is what arises when adults in an adult-dominated society are the sole advocates of kids. Adults need not be left out of the equation, but kids need to be able to advocate for themselves as well. Once they are, the possibilities available will grow in accordance.

I believe you have mentioned adolescents who petition the court for emancipation. I suspect such petitions should be granted more often than they are. It would be interesting to do an experiment and randomly divide borderline cases into emancipate-or-not groups and then follow them for ten years or more to see who has the better outcomes. Possibilities captured by such aphorisms as "the grass is always greener" and "out of the frying pan and into the fire" come to mind. But we wouldn't know until we tried, and it would be worth trying.

This again begs the question of whether or not people prefer freedom even when things get difficult. Of course, if kids had a voice in how society is run, they would have a lot of influence in making things out in the world less difficult for all concerned, since they tend to embrace change more than adults do. Of course, no youth liberationist has ever argued that kids who achieve emancipation should be disallowed to reverse it if they felt they eventually came to believe they not handle it. This is similar to allowing women to choose to give up their freedom and live in BDSM relationships or those of traditional male dominance if this is what they prefer for whatever reason; or even for adult men choosing to live as "kept" partners in relationships with a wealthy woman who calls most of the shots.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course schools could be vastly improved. Lots more money would help, among other things.

Offering more facilities is not enough of a change. We are talking about not only democratizing them along the lines of the Sudbury model and requiring the government (if such still exists) to subsidize them just as they do the standardized public schools of today, along with all other educational alternatives. The problem of not enough funding and not enough teachers is nowhere near the beginning and end of the problem, save to those who are cool with the status quo more or less as it is.

Parents are free in most places (all?) to home school their kids. Private schools can form according to any progressive ideology they want.

Except kids are still subject to the full control of adults in these situations, with adults entirely deciding on what the curriculum will be, and what the rules will be. These are not remotely examples of solutions to the problems we are discussing here.

Unpacking that convoluted prose,

And I'm sure that if you agreed with it, you would find it considerably easier to "de-convolute."

you're saying that society does heavily disapprove of lots of things that are harmful to kids. But there are others that are harmful that they don't take decisive action on. Some of it has to do with money -- preventing those harms could be very expensive.

Yet somehow money is never an object when it comes to funding the war machine, imperialist ventures overseas, or bailing out adult bankers who deliberately defraud millions of people whom they knowingly gave bad loans to. A single word to mentally digest here, Ethan: priorities.

Other times you have an especially rosy view of human nature -- that kids would all be honorable and loving if only they weren't corrupted.

Translation: I do not believe that people will automatically act as badly as they often do now if they aren't treated as badly as they all too often are now. Yes, Ethan, I do not agree that human nature is just hard-wired to be "bad" and that laws and social policies that are based on pre-emptive mistrust of our fellow human should ever be justified in a democracy.

Well, we all have the potential for both good and bad behavior, and schools like Summerhill were not an unqualified success. Lots of liberated youths would drink and drive and kill people, among other problems.

If they were subjected to all of the same hardships that adults are today, then yes, they quite possibly would. But they wouldn't be worse than adults, is what I'm saying, if they were treated like full human beings. And if they had a voice in how society is run, they may very well be more open to voting for changes that society needs to improve things for everyone, but which would be implemented much more slowly if left entirely to older adults who are extremely jaded and set in their ways. For instance, they may be more inclined to vote for vast amounts of funding being put towards making things easier for all of us instead of another round of drone assaults on a Middle Eastern nation that isn't Saudi Arabia, or giving more military support to Israel.