Completely agree with you , and I ' m not an authoritarian either but a child ' s best chances for a good life , most of the time , is to be with their parents in an open , honest relationship . Not because children are the possessions of their parents , but because there ' s no guarantee that foster caresocial servicesauthority figures that intervene are going to be better than the parentsmany times they ' re worse , and removing children from their home or encouraging them them to deceive their parents is still going to have a negative impact on their development . Even on the chance that their new environment is better , it will still have an effect . So yeah , report all evidence of abuse , but there needs to be evidence of abuse before we start taking drastic actions . Also , If your kid is gay , and can tell his teacher , but hasn ' t told you , then you are the problem , I ' m not gay , but I can ' t believe this is necessarily true . I know from personal experience that it ' s often easier to tell complete strangersonline , or acquaintances painful truths about yourself than to tell close friends and family . That emotional connection doesn ' t exist with the former , and you can always tell yourself that if the online personacquaintance reacts badly , well , they won ' t be in your life forever . I can easily imagine that telling a teacher something like this can be a trial run to telling one ' s parents , so it sounds like quite a jump to this conclusion . And hurtful to a family to hear this if the child does eventually tell them , even if not first .