Let’s face it, the country is in the midst of a youth mental health crisis. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which surveyed U.S. high school students found that 39.7% of students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the previous year, 28.5% reported poor mental health most of the time or always during the previous 30 days, 20.4% seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9.5% reported actually attempting suicide during the previous year. These numbers are alarming and reflect the struggles that many young people are facing in their daily lives. So what is our country doing about this problem? Is our government focusing on trying to improve mental health support for young people to hopefully combat this crisis? No, many states are doing the exact opposite, actually. Throughout the last few years, Republicans have actively been waging war on mental health support for youth, including access to school counselors, therapists and even suicide prevention resources. These restrictions are extremely harmful for youth, as they specifically cut off youth with oppressive and abusive parents from being able to access crucial support systems.
Table of Contents
- Ways that Republicans are Restricting Access to Youth Mental Health Support
- The Benefits of School Counselors and Therapy for Youth
- The Harms of “Parental Rights” – How Parents are the Cause of Youth Mental Struggles
- Republicans are Directly Supporting Abusive Parents with these Laws
Ways that Republicans are Restricting Access to Youth Mental Health Support
First of all it is important to note that there are already major restrictions on minors’ access to mental health support that have existed long before the current youth mental health crisis. In many states, minors cannot access outpatient therapy without parental consent, which limits their ability to acquire mental health support independently. However, this problem has only exacerbated in recent years with Republicans’ crusade against mental health support for youth. There have been several recent examples of Republican backed laws and bills that have the specific goal of restricting young persons ability to independently access mental health support, with even heavier barriers previously unheard of in US legislation.
Texas
One of the most egregious of these laws is Texas’ “Parental Bill of Rights”, which I have written about its harms multiple times. Firstly, what this bill does is create parental consent requirements for “health related services” and “health care services.” Health related services are routine tasks such as basic first aid, wellness checks, vision or hearing screenings, and other functions that don’t qualify as medical treatment. Under the law, schools only need to notify parents about these services and allow parents to opt their child out if they choose. By contrast, health care services include any action that could be considered medical treatment, administering medications, evaluating injuries beyond first aid, making clinical judgments, or performing procedures that go beyond simple care. These services now require active opt-in consent from a parent before a nurse can legally provide them, except in genuine emergencies.
This means that parents can “opt out” their child from being able to receive any basic mental health support in schools, and need to specifically consent to allow schools to provide more complex support. Under the current framework, short-term, school counseling is generally treated as a “health-related service” that parents can opt their child out of, and psychological/psychiatric treatment and other “health-care services” require affirmative parental consent. So therefore, a Texas parent can completely prevent a student from accessing school counseling and mental-health support under this law. Of course, this law was passed by using “parental rights” as a scapegoat for stripping young people of their ability to access support in schools.
Idaho
One of the other strongest recent examples of this is Idaho’s Senate Bill 1329, which was passed in 2024 and had particularly devastating effects for youth in mental health crises. SB 1329, sponsored by Republican Senate Majority Leader Kelly Anthon and supported unanimously by Republican legislators, generally prohibited all health-care services for an unemancipated minor without parental consent, with a narrow emergency exception for preventing death or “imminent, irreparable physical injury.” The definition of health care was broad enough to include mental-health care. The effect reached even the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Idaho’s suicide hotline began telling minors that, unless they were in an active enough crisis to fall within the law’s emergency exception, counselors could not continue providing support without parental consent.
One high-school freshman told the Idaho Statesman that after calling 988 because he was struggling and wanted someone to talk to, the counselor had to end the conversation because he was not in an immediate suicidal crisis. This law received so much backlash that Republicans were forced to backtrack and specifically address some of these issues with future legislation. Idaho lawmakers subsequently introduced a “band-aid bill” in 2026 to loosen some of those consequences, including specifically allowing 988 to provide immediate services to minors without first obtaining parental consent. However, this still did not address the fact that minors still have basically no ability to access regular therapy and other forms of mental health support in the state without parental consent.
Alabama
An Alabama bill introduced by Republicans, like Texas’ law, also targets school counselors and mental health support for students. SB 101 in Alabama, which went into effect in 2025 and was sponsored by Republican Sen. Larry Stutts, raised the state’s independent medical-consent age from 14 to 16, including for mental-health services. Before the change, an ordinary 14 or 15-year-old could generally consent to legally authorized medical, dental, and mental-health services; the new law generally requires parental involvement until 16 unless an exception applies. The law also specifically addresses schools: Alabama’s medical licensing board explains that students younger than 16 require written parental permission to participate in school counseling services, and local school boards must annually tell parents about available medical services and their ability to allow, limit, or prevent their child’s participation.
Montana
In Montana, Republican Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe sponsored HB 676, which Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed in 2023. The law broadly requires parental consent for a child’s mental-health evaluation or mental-health treatment and revised Montana’s existing minor-consent statutes. Of particular relevance, HB 676 repealed Montana Code § 41-1-406, which had provided an additional pathway through which minors could independently receive health services. According to the 2026 JAMA Health Forum legal analysis, the legislation eliminated a provision that had allowed minors of any age to obtain mental-health counseling independently under specified circumstances. Montana retained a separate statute permitting minors 16 and older to consent independently to mental-health services, so the harms of the new law fell particularly on younger teenagers seeking mental health support.
Proposed Bills
There have also been many recent examples of proposed legislation by republicans specifically seeking to limit, restrict or completely bar a minor to independently be able to receive therapy, and access to school counselors without parental consent. Kansas Republican Rep. Megan Steele introduced HB 2420 in 2026 specifically to require parental consent before a school provides a student with a school-based mental-health service. The bill defines those services to include counseling based therapeutic models intended to influence or address a student’s emotional, behavioral, or social functioning. Under the version advanced by the House Education Committee, a school would have to directly notify the student’s parent, provide written information about the proposed support, and obtain the parent’s written or electronic signature before providing the service. The original version even proposed a $5,000 civil penalty per violation, although that penalty was later removed in committee
Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Stephenie Scialabba, joined by several Republican cosponsors, introduced HB 249 in 2025, which would create statewide rules governing school counseling. Among other provisions, schools would have to establish procedures requiring parents to affirmatively opt their children into social and emotional counseling. The proposal is actually stricter than any law on school counselors in the entire country so far. While Texas’ law allows parents to opt their child out of being able to access counseling services in schools, thus one specifically requires the parents to opt the child into them. Along with this, it creates an even stricter barrier that would eliminate the practicality of most students from being able to receive counseling in schools; it states that parents or legal guardians must be present whenever a student is counseled in the context of social-emotional learning or counseling. It would also provide parents with a private cause of action if they believe they were denied meaningful involvement in counseling.
Florida Republican lawmakers advanced companion parental-rights bills in 2025 that would have expanded parental-consent requirements in several areas affecting youth health and mental-health support. HB 1505 required parental or guardian consent for certain services provided by a mobile response team, teams specifically designed to respond to children and adolescents experiencing behavioral-health crises. It also expanded parental control over school well-being questionnaires and health screening forms. The House version passed 80–28 but ultimately died in the Senate, while the Senate companion also failed to receive final passage. Therefore, these provisions luckily did not become law.
All of these laws and bills that have been sponsored or proposed by Republican lawmakers show a blatant disregard for youth mental health. In the midst of a youth mental health crisis, Republican politicians think that it is more important to increase barriers, restrictions, and parental control over minors’ ability to seek support, instead of increasing the support that is available for them. These laws blatantly disregard youth autonomy, and are dangerous for youth who are struggling with their mental health.
The Benefits of School Counselors and Therapy for Youth
Now, before I go into depth regarding the harms of these laws, I think it is important to establish the fact that school counselors and therapy is even beneficial for struggling youth in general. Of course, it seems obvious that a young person struggling with their mental health will benefit from resources that are there to support them through these struggles—and many studies back this up. There is substantial research showing that providing mental-health services directly through schools can benefit students. A 2022 meta-analysis of 29 rigorous randomized controlled studies involving 22,420 students examined school-based interventions targeting depression or anxiety. The researchers found significant overall benefits for both anxiety and depression, with especially strong results for programs targeting anxiety, interventions using cognitive behavioral therapy, clinician-delivered programs, and programs involving secondary-school students.
School support can also help because it places assistance somewhere students already spend much of their day. The CDC’s research on school connectedness finds that students who feel that adults and peers at school care about them are less likely to report poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, substance use, and violence, while being more likely to attend school and succeed academically. The CDC specifically recommends creating safe spaces, identifying trusted adults, and strengthening relationships between students and school staff as ways to protect youth mental health. The benefits are therefore not limited to formal psychotherapy. Access to a counselor, trusted adult, wellness space, school mental-health clinician, or other supportive relationship can provide students with an earlier and more accessible route to help. This is especially important for students who may not be able to independently locate or pay for an outside therapist.
The evidence for therapy itself is also extensive. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry states that research supports psychotherapy as either a standalone treatment or part of combined treatment for numerous youth mental-health conditions, including depression, anxiety disorders, trauma-related disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, disruptive-behavior disorders, eating disorders, and substance-use disorders. For depression specifically, a meta-analysis of 40 randomized trials found that 39% of young people receiving psychotherapy responded to treatment, compared with 24% in control conditions. Clinically significant improvement occurred in 54% of those receiving therapy compared with 32% of controls, while recovery occurred in 58% compared with 36%. The benefits were still statistically significant six to twelve months later. The authors also found that deterioration was less common among treated youth: 6% in therapy versus 13% in control groups.
A larger network meta-analysis of 52 studies involving 3,805 children and adolescents with depression found that both cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal therapy (IPT) were significantly more effective than most control conditions at the end of treatment, with benefits also appearing at follow-up. There is similarly strong evidence for anxiety treatment. A network meta-analysis covering 101 trials and 6,625 children and adolescents found that psychotherapy, particularly group cognitive behavioral therapy, was effective at reducing anxiety symptoms.
Now, this is not to say that having access to school counselors, student mental health resources, or psychotherapy is an instant cure to all mental health struggles that a young person is facing. Not all school counselors will be effective in actually helping with a student’s issues, and not every therapist or therapy setting will produce positive results for all struggling youth. However, the studies consistently show that having access to these resources is overall beneficial for young people with mental health struggles, and leads to positive results in their lives. Since there is substantial evidence that mental health support resources including school counselors and therapy are beneficial to struggling teenagers, it is reasonable to assume that restricting teenagers from being able to access these resources will therefore have negative consequences for the youth who need those resources but are unable to access them. This is why the laws creating these barriers are directly harmful to youth.
The Harms of “Parental Rights” – How Parents are the Cause of Youth Mental Struggles
If you notice a common pattern among republican lawmakers’ justification for these laws and regulations, it always centers around “parental rights”. However, “parental rights” as an idea is directly harmful for young people. Whenever a law is celebrated as a win for parental rights, it “increases parents rights” by directly removing a right from minors that should belong to them in the first place. Because a parent’s right to make decisions regarding their child is seen as an extension of their own autonomy, the threat to the child’s rights is usually ignored. The entire basis of this idea is that parents deserve a fundamental right to know everything that goes on with their child, even when it comes to private matters like them seeking mental health support. These laws value parental knowledge over the safety and well being of young people, by tying their access to support on their willingness to be open with their parents, or their parents’ willingness to allow them to receive said support.
Parents Can Punish Young People for Opening up or Seeking Support
Parents and family dynamics are often the cause of a young person’s struggling, and expressing these feelings to parents can often lead to worse results for the young person in question. Parents can often act as a barrier for children receiving mental health support, punish them for opening up, punish them for wanting to seek support, or punish them for even experiencing mental health struggles in the first place. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that many parents are medically neglectful, don’t believe in therapy, or will punish children rather than trying to support them.
A particular 2024 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology surveyed 1,495 adolescents with histories of suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, or nonsuicidal self-injury who had disclosed these issues in therapy. Researchers specifically asked what happened when therapists informed their parents. A substantial number described reactions that they perceived as harmful or punitive.
Examples reported by the adolescents included parents:
- Making fun of them after learning about their mental-health struggles,
- Calling them dramatic, manipulative, selfish, or attention-seeking,
- Becoming angry or expressing disappointment at the child,
- Guilt-tripping them by emphasizing how much the parents had provided for them and suggesting they therefore had no reason to want to die,
- Forcing children to display self-harm injuries or submit to repeated inspections of their bodies
- Restricting access to friends, activities, places, or possessions in ways that the adolescents experienced as punishment rather than support.
One participant said their mother subsequently made fun of them for their self-harm. Another reported being told they were “dramatic and trying to get attention.” Another said their parents became angry because the teenager had leaned on friends for emotional support. The study’s authors specifically noted that restrictions imposed after disclosure were often described negatively and experienced by adolescents as punitive or unhelpful. Other participants described parents taking away phones, restricting friends and significant others, and imposing months of constant monitoring; one teenager recalled a parent taking away their phone and telling them to pray, while another said their parents prevented them from seeing their boyfriend and his family.
First person stories also back this idea of parental punishment up. According to a first-person account published by The Guardian, a young woman describing her adolescence said that when she began self-harming, her mother responded by taking away the hobby that had been one of her outlets, screaming at her during a panic attack, and slapping her after discovering that she was self-harming. She was writing because she saw a similar dynamic occurring with her 16-year-old cousin. According to the account, the cousin was struggling severely, saying that she hated her life and no longer enjoyed anything. Rather than interpreting her behavior as possible depression, the girl’s parents reportedly treated her exhaustion and withdrawal as laziness, prohibited activities she enjoyed such as video games, and resisted getting her mental-health treatment.
Because of the fact that parents often punish their children for expressing concerns with mental health, it is no wonder why teenagers often refuse to open up to their parents about these issues. Among adolescents describing their worst disclosure experience, nearly 73% of those whose parents had previously been unaware of their struggles said at the time that telling their parents had not been the right decision, and roughly half still felt that way when surveyed later. Some explicitly said the experience caused them to conceal subsequent self-harm.
These studies, together, all support the idea that requiring parental consent for youth to receive mental health support has several fundamental flaws. First of all, teenagers growing up in abusive homes know their parents. As someone who grew up in a toxic, unstable home myself, take my word for it, that teenagers understand exactly the situation they are living in. They learn to walk on eggshells, and never do anything that could cause an adverse reaction from a volatile parent. So if a teenager knows that their parents are the type of people to punish them, restrict their friends, berate them, or otherwise abuse them as a reaction to learning about their mental health struggles, it is reasonable to assume that they won’t inform their parents of these struggles in the first place. This is where the harm of requiring parental consent for mental health support is explicitly dangerous, because it cuts off young people with oppressive parents from being able to receive this support at all.
If a young person knows that their parents are volatile, and are likely to react with punishments or abuse to them asking for their consent to receive therapy, do you think they’re even going to ask in the first place? The simple answer is, they won’t. So therefore, the only result of laws and regulations like this is that youth who are already struggling due to living with these volatile parents (and likely need mental health support the most) are cut off from it. Republicans’ desire to enforce “parental rights” is only leading to struggling youth suffering.
Now, some may argue that this only applies to situations where affirmative consent is needed to access mental health support, and it won’t cause parents to specifically opt their children out of being able to access school counselors or other mental health resources. However, there is a good chance that abusive parents will go to great lengths to specifically hinder their children’s ability to access mental health support, in order to prevent the young person from opening up about the abuse they are facing. In order to examine the severity of this issue, it is first important to determine what is the main cause of the youth mental health crisis in the first place.
Most Youth Mental Health Struggles are a Result of Parental Abuse
Parents are often the exact problem in the young person’s situation that is causing them to struggle. First of all, problems in the family are the leading cause for depression among youth. The Philadelphia Youth Risk Behavior Survey provides one of the clearest examples. Philadelphia surveyed nearly 1,100 students in grades 9–12 from 32 randomly selected public schools and asked unusually detailed questions about parental violence, psychological abuse, domestic violence, being kicked out of the home, parental substance abuse, severe household mental health problems, incarceration, sexual victimization, school bullying, racism, friendships, sleep, and other experiences.
When analyzing the factors significantly associated with frequently poor mental health, approximately 50% (the highest percentage by far) involved parent and family circumstances. The next highest factor, at only 23% (less than half of the previous) involved personal experiences such as rape, concussion, and lack of sleep, while 21% involved school factors including bullying, racism, and lack of friends. The differences were even more striking for suicide attempts. The majority (52%) of the identified factors associated with suicide attempts involved parent or family conditions, including being kicked out, violence in the home, and recent violent abuse by parents. The remaining 48% involved personal experiences such as rape, sexual abuse, neighborhood violence, and concussion.
Researcher Mike Males reached a similar conclusion using the national 2023 CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey. His analysis found that teenagers experiencing frequent or severe family abuse and adversity were approximately seven times more likely to report poor mental health than teenagers experiencing little or none. The CDC itself has found extremely large relationships between adverse childhood experiences and teenage mental health. Its analysis of the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey estimated that exposure to one or more adverse childhood experiences was associated with population-attributable fractions of 65.6% for persistent sadness or hopelessness, 85.4% for seriously considering suicide, and 89.4% for suicide attempts.
The same study also showed just how common abuse in the home, and other adverse childhood experiences were for young people. The CDC found that 61.5% reported emotional abuse, 31.8% reported physical abuse, 18.6% had witnessed intimate-partner violence in the household, 25.1% lived in a household affected by substance use, 28.4% lived with household poor mental health, and 14.5% had a parent or guardian who had been incarcerated or detained.
These sources show that the clear majority of youth mental health struggles regarding depression and suicidal ideation are a direct result from parental abuse, family dynamics, and other problems in a young person’s home life. Along with that, the most striking finding is that almost two thirds of high schoolers surveyed reported that they were experiencing emotional abuse in their home, and almost one third were experiencing physical abuse in their home. When looking at this data, it becomes alarmingly clear that the youth mental health crisis is a manifestation of a reaction towards the epidemic of parental abuse that children are forced to endure.
Abusive Parents Can Hinder or Restrict Mental Health Support for Teenagers to Protect Themselves
When cross-referencing this information with the recent restrictions on youth access to mental health services, it is especially important to consider the fact that school counselors and therapists are mandatory reporters of abuse. While state laws on this vary, the American School Counselor Association states that school counselors have a legal and ethical duty to report suspected child abuse or neglect to the proper authorities. Its ethical standards say that counselors must report when they have reasonable suspicion of abuse; they do not need certainty before making a report. A federal Child Welfare Information Gateway review of state mandatory-reporting laws found that counselors, therapists, and other mental-health professionals are specifically designated as mandatory reporters in 38 states plus D.C. and several territories, while many other states impose reporting duties on all persons rather than only specified professions.
So if a child reports abuse to a school consular or therapist, it is likely that an investigation will begin, and the parent could face consequences. A particularly strong documented example is Donald John Noland v. State, a Texas criminal case. K.B., who was 12 years old, told two friends at school that her stepfather was sexually abusing her when her mother was away. Her friends went to school counselor Kim Vaughn, who then spoke directly with K.B. and reported the allegations to Child Protective Services. CPS interviewed K.B. and her parents, visited the home, contacted Temple police, arranged a sexual-assault examination, and had K.B. interviewed at a Child Advocacy Center. K.B. was subsequently removed from the home.
So obviously if an abusive or oppressive parent or household dynamic is the direct cause of a young person’s poor mental health, the parent would not want that information to get out. Because if information of their abuse got out, then they would face consequences. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that abusive parents will go to great lengths to limit, restrict and hinder a young person’s ability to speak about the struggles in their home life, and the abuse that they are living with. So if a state’s law requires a parent to consent to a young person’s ability to receive therapy, they’re most likely not going to allow it, causing that young person to be cut off from support. Furthermore, if an abusive parent has an option to prevent their child from speaking with a school counselor, they’re also most likely going to do so, in order to prevent word of their abuse from getting out when their child seeks support. So by tying a minors’ ability to seek mental health support to their parents’ willingness to allow it, these laws are effectively cutting off the majority of children (because they are living with abusive parents) from being able to access support for their struggles.
Republicans are Directly Supporting Abusive Parents with these Laws
Because of the fact that school consulars and therapists don’t just act as mental health supporters, but also as protectors against abuse that young people can face, it is especially disturbing how there has been a war being waged against them by republicans. However, this becomes even more disturbing, and even downright suspicious, when you consider the timeline of events. As researcher Mike Males noted, the CDC didn’t even begin to survey young people about the abuse situation in their home until 2021. The 2021 and 2023 CDC youth risk surveys both overwhelmingly showed that the greatest contributing factor to the youth mental health crisis was family abuse. So after 2021, that information was put clear as day, established by a reputable government agency. Because of this, the government’s reaction to the situation should obviously be focused on addressing this issue, and working to support youth mental health by combating family abuse. However, they did the exact opposite. All of the recent laws and proposed bills to tie youth mental health support to parental consent were pushed in 2023 – 2026, after this data was already available. If anything, this seems counterintuitive, right? This seems like republican states’ governments are directly trying to empower family abuse by silencing ways for young people to speak up and seek support.
Is this the case? Well, in order to answer that question, it is important to look at the next round of CDC youth risk surveys. Remember, the CDC didn’t ask teenagers questions about abuse in the home on these surveys until 2021, continuing the questions in the 2023 survey. Importantly, this was under a primarily Democrat administration. However, under Trump’s second administration, the 2025 CDC survey was far different. Mike Males raised this concern in his article on “The Centers for Disease Control’s 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey deletes nearly all crucial questions on parents’ and adults’ abuses. Why?”. Males compares the 2023 and 2025 CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey questionnaires and points out that the 2023 survey included seven important questions about abuse and household adversity, including parental/adult physical and emotional abuse, violence between adults in the home, severe household mental-health problems, drug or alcohol abuse, incarceration, and adult-perpetrated sexual assault. In the 2025 survey, most of those key questions were purposely removed.
So is it a coincidence that Republicans specifically began tightening restrictions on youth access to mental health support and school counselors right after the government reported that parental abuse was the leading cause of poor teenage mental health? Is it a coincidence that the only time the CDC could even ask these questions was under a Democrat administration—and most of them were removed once Republicans took power? I think a logical conclusion here is that Republicans are actively trying to silence the idea that parents are the cause of the youth mental health crisis. Why would they do this? It’s simple: this idea threatens the notion of parental rights—that parents should have unquestioning authority to control everything about their children’s lives. If the public begins to wake up to the fact that young people are being abused and oppressed in their homes on a daily basis, which is leading to mass amounts of depression, anxiety, and suicide, then they will want something done about this. People will then begin to realize the flaws in “parental rights” as an ideology—and realize that the majority of parents are not perfect, may not have their child’s best interests at heart, and therefore should not be entitled to control every decision their child can make.
In another instance that reflects the same idea, a Republican backed “Parental Rights” initiative in Washington, IL26-001, will be voted on during the upcoming 2026 midterms. This measure is framed as a win for parental rights, by increasing parents’ “opt out” powers, and increasing parental access to school materials. However, there is an explicit provision that directly harms student rights and threatens abused youth. IL26-001 specifically repeals protections for abused youth regarding their school records, restoring the right of parents who are under criminal proceedings for crimes against their child to access their child’s medical, disciplinary and school counseling records. THis is extremely threatening for students who use school counselors to discuss their family issues, including the very abuse that the parents may be facing criminal proceedings for. Once again, this is a direct instance of Republican backed “parental rights” initiatives being used to increase the rights of abusive parents to exert control over their child.
Some people may argue that Republicans aren’t “directly supporting” abusive parents when they’re advocating for parental rights bills. Some may say that the dangers to vulnerable youth with abusive parents is just an unintended consequence of laws that strengthen parental rights. However, there have been clear instances of conservatives actively expressing support for abusive parents, and using that to advocate against school counselors for youth. For example, there was a recent major controversy regarding the Kutzko family after their transgender child was removed from them.
According to WBUR’s review of Westborough District Court records, the teenager reported to a school counselor that their father, Joseph Kutzko, of physically assaulting and threatening them at the family’s Southborough home on January 28, 2025. A police detective wrote that Kutzko allegedly punched the teenager in the shoulder, repeatedly pulled their hair, raised a clenched fist while threatening to punch them, and threatened to kill them during an argument connected to a birthday celebration. The teenager reported the incident to school personnel the following day, after which police became involved and Kutzko was arrested and charged with assault-related offenses and threatening to commit a crime. He pleaded not guilty, and the case was later resolved through pretrial probation rather than a conviction, with conditions including anger-management treatment, staying away from the teenager, and complying with a restraining order. The teenager’s mother, Arlene Kutzko, was also charged in connection with the incident. WBUR reported that she was charged with witness intimidation after pressuring the teenager to minimize or retract what had been reported to school officials, including telling the child to say they had been “exaggerating and being stupid.”
So obviously, this should be universally condemned, right? This family had multiple abuse allegations and charges against them, after a teenager reported the abuse they were facing to a school counselor, leading to them being removed from the abusive home. However, the reaction by Republicans and conservatives was completely the opposite of how you would expect a reasonable person to react to such an atrocity. Their reactions only focused on the conflicts regarding the child’s gender identity, as the parents reported that their child had been removed due to them refusing to accept the child’s gender transition. The parents, Joseph and Arlene Kutzko, have argued publicly that state and school officials interfered with their parental rights and “facilitated” their child’s transition without their consent.
A Fox News Lighthouse Faith report stated outright that DCF removed the teenager “because” the parents would not recognize their child as a boy. The report states that the school “began to secretly transition her without their knowledge and removed her from home. Further Fox news reporting and other reports from republican/conservative resources only focused on the parents’ conflict with the school over the child’s gender identity, while completely ignoring the accusations of abuse which is what actually led to the child being removed from the home. Conservative commentators amplified that framing on social media. Popular conservative influencer and vocal anti-trans advocate Riley Gains posted on X, “State taking ownership of a child is a communists dream. In a just society, there would be a societal uproar. Parents should NEVER have to coparent with the government. Please help this family and their daughter”, in reaction to the story. Another conservative influencer, Gunther Eagleman posted on X: “🚨 HOLY CRAP! A devout Catholic family in Massachusetts is locked in a legal war to stop the state from transitioning their teen daughter without their consent. Joseph and Arline have not spoken to Sophie since 2024, after family services ripped her from their home because they would not affirm her as a boy. This can’t happen! YOUR KIDS ARE NOT THE STATE’S PROPERTY.”
This story is a stark example of republicans actively supporting abusive parents, by completely ignoring their abusive behavior, and instead arguing that “parental rights” should be an excuse for them to treat their child however they want, without having to face consequences from the state. On top of this, the parents, as well as many conservatives used the excuse of the school “facilitating” the gender transition of the child to once again push the “parental rights” narrative that parents should have the ability to opt children out of anything they want. However, this was just a scapegoat in order to cut vulnerable youth off from a way to report the abuse they are facing from oppressive parents at home.
Whenever oppressive and transphobic parents allege that a school “assisted” or “facilitated” a minor in their gender transition, that is more often than not a disingenuous claim. What actually occurs in cases with these allegations, is that school staff members simply referred to the student, using their preferred gender identity and pronouns, without the parent’s consent. This definition of “assisting social transitioning” is actually even used by many anti-LGBTQ bills across the US. Texas’ parental bill of rights requires every Texas public school district to adopt a policy prohibiting district employees from assisting a student with what the statute calls “social transitioning.” The law defines social transitioning as moving from a person’s biological sex at birth to the opposite biological sex through the use of a different name, different pronouns, or other expressions of gender that deny or encourage denial of the person’s biological sex at birth.
So when lawsuits allege a school was assisting in a gender transition, all that means is that the teacher was simply respecting a students’ preferred pronouns or name. This isn’t “assisting” in their transition, this isn’t doing anything wrong or harmful, this is simple respect and support for a student who is obviously already in a vulnerable state. Teachers should not be punished for being respectful and attempting to support their students—they should be rewarded for such behavior. And parents attempting to shut down teachers and school staff members’ ability to support students in this way is directly showing how conservative parents want worse outcomes for queer youth by cutting off their support systems.
This story is a clear example of the epitome of all the points I have made throughout this article. A child was dealing with an abusive home environment, where their parents were actively emotionally abusing them by discriminating against their gender identity, and allegedly physically abusing them, neglecting them and threatening them as well (while attempting to discourage the teenager from speaking out). The teenager then reported this to a school counselor, which got the parents arrested and the child removed from the home. Republicans then backed up the parents who caused the problem in the first place, while using the gender identity conflict as a scapegoat to argue that the school violated parental rights by assisting the child in the situation. If this doesn’t show you that “parental rights” laws affecting youth access to school counselors are all about keeping youth silent about parental abuse, then I don’t know what does.
The “Youth Mental Health Crisis” as we know it, is mostly caused by young people facing abuse in their home life from parents. Abusive parents will often punish young people for seeking mental health support or experiencing mental health struggles in the first place. They will also often restrict their children’s access to mental health support in order to protect themselves from consequences of their child reporting their abuse. Still, Republicans will push for more parental consent requirements over therapy and school counselor access for youth. They aren’t just ignoring the facts of parental abuse, they’re sometimes even directly supporting it.
While this is not an endorsement of the Democrat party, or a condemnation of the entire Republican party, we at NYRA want to hold Republican lawmakers accountable for the outright dangerous measures and ideas they are pushing. Unfortunately, the evidence does show that many republican lawmakers and conservative influencers are pro-child-abuse, and mask it with the parental rights agenda, which directly leads to vulnerable youth being cut off from crucial support for both their mental health struggles and a way to report abuse they are experiencing in the home. Young people deserve access to therapists and school counselors without having to worry about getting the consent of their parents which are oftentimes the very source of the abuse they are facing, or the mental health struggles they are living with. Parents are not perfect—they can be abusive, oppressive, and downright cruel, which is exactly why we cannot trust parents to have control and access to every aspect of a young person’s life. Minors deserve basic autonomy in the same way that adults do, and this should not be limited from them just because of their age. NYRA urges the Republican party to move away from their push for “parental rights”, and recognize the harms that these restrictions on minors can cause.
The National Youth Rights Association
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share about how facing parental abuse, how restrictions on mental health support negatively impacted your life, or about a youth rights violation you’ve experienced, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
The text of Republicans’ War on School Counselors and Mental Health Support for Youth © 2026 by Zane Miller is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
