Social Services Does Not Exist / Western Animation

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• Alvin and the Chipmunks: Subverted. The Chipettes initially lived in a treehouse by themselves for a couple of seasons. By season 4, however, the school finds out about this, and a social worker begins to try and find someone to take them in. Fearing that they would be stuck in separate foster homes, Alvin gets the idea of talking his neighbor Miss Miller into being their foster mother.
• American Dad!: Stan has done pretty questionable things as a parent, such as allowing Steve to have sex with Mexican prostitutes even though he is a minor, locking Hayley in the basement with weaponry and attack animals, mutilating Hayley's face beyond recognition, brutally bullying Steve to the point of beating him to a pulp, stabbing Steve in the leg, getting his children nearly killed in a hurricane, etc. Francine also has her moments, like ignoring Steve's disappearance for nine months, starving Steve, and deliberately sabotaging Hayley's new business career. One has to wonder how CPS has never been involved.
• Animaniacs: Mindy's mother leaves her toddler in a harness attached to a tree and expects her dog, Buttons, to watch over her time and time again; she's otherwise unsupervised. Naturally, Buttons is the primary reason Mindy remains alive. Lampshaded when Mindy's mother leaves Mindy alone to go to a "better parenting conference".
• Beavis and Butt-Head: Beavis and Butt-Head are teenagers who appear to live on their own, which begs the question of how no one considered checking on their home life. One would even ask where their mothers are.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: The Delightful Children were kidnapped and brainwashed by a man who then adopted them and is implied to frequently subject them to abuse. How in the world five children disappearing go virtually unnoticed, and why has nobody caught on that there's something off about how the kids behave is a mystery.
• The Fairly OddParents!: Mr. and Mrs. Turner frequently neglect their son at home and leave him in the hands of a sadistically evil babysitter. While Timmy's misery is the reason that he gets fairy godparents, it's not like his parents know that. The other kids Vicky babysits or often meets and her little sister Tootie don't get it much better either.
• Family Guy: Peter and Lois don't start out so bad. But they degenerate into complete jerkasses, with Peter even stating he doesn't care for the kids that much. And Meg is treated absolutely appallingly in many episodes. In "Dial Meg For Murder", Peter lassos her, drags her down the stairs, and prepares to brand her with a red hot poker. Turns out she's already been branded by the mayor, not that Peter cares. He also practices riding a bronco on Chris' back. Lois is more one for emotional neglect, only showing the slightest affection for her kids when it suits her. Even Stewie doesn't get off scot-free, often left on his own for long periods of time, or with no company other than the family dog. The dog is intelligent and can talk, but still. When Meg is Calling the Old Man Out in "Seahorse Seashell Party", she states that if anyone from the outside world knew how he treated her, Peter would be in jail by now.
• Goof Troop: Pete gets away with such things as tricking his preteen child into taking over his job for a day, pressuring him into skydiving, threatening him in front of a public official, and admitting (or all but admitting) to being a bad parent in a courtroom and a hospital without even being monitored, notwithstanding all the health-detrimental forced labor that could have been caught if he were. PJ doesn't even hide the fact he's miserable at home, and on some occasions, it's obvious he desperately wants to leave.
• Gravity Falls:
  • More often than not, Stan does something that would get the twins sent right back home to their parents if the cops were the least bit capable at their jobs. At best, he tends to turn a blind eye to all the potentially dangerous shenanigans that Dipper and Mabel get up to, and at worst... it's outright stated that the three of them have spent at least one night in jail.
  • Subverted on one occasion when the Mystery Shack is raided by government agents. One of the agents does intend to take Dipper and Mabel to Child Protective Services (though he doesn't see to realize that the twins have two loving parents). It's only because the agents are mind-wiped by the memory gun that the twins got to stay with Stan.
  • Pacifica's parents are very emotionally abusive, to the point that Pacifica is straight-up scared of displeasing them. Not to mention the fact that they basically trained her to respond with contrition whenever they ring a bell...
• Harvey Beaks: Despite the pseudo-modern setting, people simply let Fee and Foo live outdoors, albeit with the Beaks family being willing to provide for them (their usual sleeping quarters are the branches of the tree the Beaks house is made from). One episode focuses on Harvey getting them to move into the actual house, which all of them eventually agree against (barring emergencies).
• Hey Arnold!:
  • Arnold's grandmother and grandfather are incredibly weird, but social services never check up — although in the movie, his grandfather mentions that if they did step in, he and grandma would go into a nursing home and Arnold would go to a foster home, potentially because of their weirdness, though also because of their age (they're in their early 80s). However, Arnold did get plenty of love and care from his grandparents and the other residents of the boarding house do function as an extended family to him.
  • Helga, meanwhile, is probably worse, given that her dad is mentally abusive (about as close to Abusive Parents as you can get while still being kid-friendly) and her mom is an alcoholic, constantly depressed, unaware of her surroundings, has no driver's license, and falls asleep in weird places after making "smoothies".
  • Also, there's Stoop Kid. A kid who has apparently never left his stoop and appears to be in his teens. He's well known around the neighborhood, begging the question of why CPS never took issue with a child acting like a completely shut-in since birth.
• Kaeloo: The main characters live in Smileyland, a place that's inhabited exclusively by kids. Kaeloo is a child with no parents (that we know of). Quack-Quack is an orphan who is being raised by Kaeloo, despite the fact that Kaeloo is also a child. Mr. Cat, also a child, ran away from his abusive family and is now living by himself. Despite all of this, social services have not intervened. To make matters even more confusing, Kaeloo's extended family knows where she lives but nobody cares that she lives alone, and Mr. Cat's mother lives within driving distance of where he currently lives. The only time when social services are brought up are when Mr. Cat tells Stumpy and Quack-Quack a Fractured Fairytale version of Cinderella where the moral is "if your parents are abusing you, call the police on them", and even in his story when the stepmother gets arrested for child abuse, the police just let young Cinderella live by herself with no adult supervision.
• The Legend of Korra: Mako's and Bolin's Back Story implies there is no Social Services in Republic City, as "death of parents" = "orphans out on the street." Justified, as the era being emulated is akin to Shanghai in the 1920s, and that period predated such institutions.
• Madeline: In Lost in Paris, the antagonist had apparently been lying to the courts for a while to keep the other girls locked up in the lace factory. Kinda surprising considering that, you know, it's France...
• The Loud House: Due to Rule of Funny, the parents get away with attitudes that would have caught the attention of social services in real life, such as locking their son out of the house because they think he brings bad luck in the episode "No Such Luck".
• Moral Orel: Played for Drama. Clay regularly emotionally and physically abuses Orel, at one point having him shot in the leg, which he prides himself on doing in the presence of the public. Bloberta, while less bad than Clay, always allows Shapey to play with dangerous objects and ignores the dangerous circumstances Orel often gets himself into. Other parents in Moralton are just as bad, such as Doughy constantly getting thrown out of his house by his immature parents and Joe not being sent to proper guardians after Nurse Bendy left him (he's raised by his 91-year-old immobilized father and apathetic half-sister).
• The Owl House: Odalia Blight is quite emotionally abusive to her youngest daughter, while her husband mostly just stands by and enables her abuse.
• The Proud Family: Suga Momma certainly treated Oscar pretty poorly. Likewise, Oscar does do some pretty terrible things to Penny, but most of the abuse Penny faces comes from her peers rather than her parents.
• Rugrats: The parents should not be allowed to keep their children, given all the unsupervised antics the baby protagonists get into.
  • They always leave Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, Lil, Dil, and Kimi in a crib or playpen; they should have figured out that Tommy can break out of most playpens or cribs with his screwdriver quite easily ages ago.
  • The only supervision they use 90 percent of the time is Grandpa Lou, a borderline narcoleptic (he falls asleep at the drop of a hat).
  • Oftentimes, when they're in a store, they'll put the babies down on the floor (again, with no one to watch them) and walk off in the opposite direction.
  • In "Baseball", Stu and Grandpa Lou took Tommy to a baseball game. He ended up part of the game and could've easily been killed if he hadn't fallen into the player's mitt, all because the two were too engrossed in their game; it was caught on camera and live TV to boot.
  • In "Reptar on Ice", they took the babies to the musical. The kids managed to sneak onto the ice itself (and Tommy is barefoot, no pants or shoes for the freezing ice), because Stu and Didi fell asleep during the show and Lou was too engrossed in it.
  • To make a long story short, if they weren't in a cartoon, all four/six of them would be dead due to the neglect their parents give them.
• The Simpsons:
  • Homer Simpson is a close second for king of this trope, although, to his credit, he finally cleans up his act in The Simpsons Movie. This was poked fun at in "Behind the Laughter", where the Running Gag of an angry Homer choking was a left-in ad-lib casually described as a surprisingly amusing act of child abuse.
  • In "Barting Over", this trope was evoked even when the law was involved. A judge emancipated Bart because Homer was such a bad father, saying she had no choices besides that and letting Homer keep custody of Bart.
  • In a specific example, in "Homer's Enemy", part of Frank Grimes ridiculously miserable backstory involved being abandoned by his parents at age four and thus never having the money to go to school; instead having to spend his childhood working by delivering toys, he never got to play with, to rich children. In real life, children are mandated by law to go school, and child labor would prevent a four-year-old from being made to work.
• South Park:
  • Pretty much every adult is a complete idiot who barely supervises their kids at all, often allowing them to get into dangerous and life-threatening situations.
  • Butters has Abusive Parents who psychologically mistreat him, ground him for the smallest mistakes he makes, even when they are things outside of Butters' control, and have viciously beat him on at least one occasion. He also has a sociopathic grandmother, who makes his parents look like saints in comparison.
  • In "Child Abduction is Not Funny", the parents collectively banish all the kids from town out of fear that they themselves will abduct their own children. Even the mayor does not question this.
• Steven Universe:
  • The titular Steven has a loving family, but he doesn't go to school, despite being twelve at the start. He apparently has never even heard of school and neither have the Gems. Word of God is he's homeschooled, but he still doesn't seem to have any formal education.
  • Greg does regularly visit Steven, and considering that they interact with the Mayor, there doesn't seem to be any problems. Later episodes reveal Greg helped build the house Steven lives in and it's most likely that Steven is registered as home-schooled and under Greg's guardianship.
  • Regarding the homeschool issue though, it is at least pretty well done. One comic had Steven follow Connie to school and it turns out that Steven is the second-smartest student in the class, behind Connie herself, so the education does seem to be valid. Another episode has Greg and Steven talking about college. Steven points out he is too busy protecting the world with the Gems to really go to college, but Greg does add he could get Steven online courses, which Steven doesn't object to.
  • Perhaps more concerning, before Greg builds the house adjoining the temple, it's in-show Canon that he and Steven live in his van, even when Steven is a newborn. And this is a setting where harsh winters appear to be reasonably common - in one episode they're only actually living indoors during a snowstorm because Vidalia asked Greg to housesit while she was away.
  • The sequel series Steven Universe: Future hammers this further in "Growing Pains" where Steven goes to Dr. Maheswaran's office for his very first check up to discuss his bizarre growth spurts. His mother-in-law flat out states that all his childhood adventures fighting gem monsters and villains have resulted in him obtaining PTSD. Any doctor who was not accustomed to the gem-related events of the series like Dr. Maheswaran would have reported their findings to child services to give Steven critical help (Though Dr. M did intend to chastise Greg for not taking Steven to a doctor sooner).
• Transformers: Animated: Sari Sumdac. Despite being the daughter of a very prominent businessman, no one in the bureaucracy has ever picked up on the fact that she legally doesn't exist. Moreover, when her father goes missing, not only is there no attempt to provide her with an adult guardian, but she's thrown out of her home by the business's new CEO. It's okay, though, because she moves in with a bunch of giant alien robots with no legal status on Earth.