Basic Trope: A parent is aware their child is in trouble but does nothing to help despite being in a position to do so.
- Straight: Alice is aware her son Bob is dealing with a bullying issue at school but never takes it up with the teachers or the bully's parents.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is dealing with a bullying problem so intense that he lashes out violently at the bully when neither the teachers nor his mother Alice help him deal with it. Alice promptly makes him comply with the bully's demands.
- Bob is violently murdered in front of Alice. Alice unpauses the TV and keeps watching.
- Downplayed: Alice is aware that Bob is having issues at school, but Bob is too distraught to go into detail about it, meaning the kid bullying him takes a little longer to track down but is ultimately punished.
- Justified:
- The kid bullying Bob is in a position that makes him untouchable by Alice.
- Alice only birthed Bob for tax benefits.
- Alice is a Dirty Coward.
- Inverted:
- Alice is way, way too eager to "solve" Bob's bullying problems. When she hears that Bob's being bullied, she works her ass off in order to obtain all of the bully's details, from the home address, to his whole ancestry (and where he came from), countless pieces of blackmail material, and eventually she decides to savagely and cruelly torture every last loved one the bully may have, before subjecting the bully to all of her torture methods, reviving him in case he dies just to keep the torture going, before eventually blowing up the whole room the bully is in, leaving Not Enough to Bury. Of course, she probably will explain everything without skipping a beat to a possibly much horrified Bob.
- The bully's parents know he is a bully but refuse to punish him.
- The bully's parents know he is a bully, and join in on the bullying.
- Subverted: Alice appears to be doing nothing about Bob's bullying problem at school, but, in reality, she has purposely tutored the bully wrong so that he fails a test because he was bullying Bob.
- Averted: Alice takes appropriate action to help Bob with his bullying problem.
- Deconstructed: When Alice forces her son Bob to comply with the bully's demands after he lashes out over the bullying, Bob decides the authorities cannot help him and he shoots the school up, killing the bully and a number of others before writing a note that spites the bully and Alice and blowing his brains out.
