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parents have to do it out of decency and know intuitively what decency is, even when it goes against the grain of what they have been taught, explicitly and implicitly, by society

you can say they aren't parents, but its not like the kids get replacements or additional supportive adults. and the consequences aren't the parents' to bear. the child has to take whatever pieces are salvageable and carve the rest of personhood by whittling whatever resilience they have

when the child is an adult and is learning to cope with the cpsd, the tools they are almost always given are grounding themselves in distance from a childhood experience of powerlessness that they were in thrall of