Which do you think is cheaper: Involving social services because someone isn't paying for school lunch, which would involve the state either paying foster parents or providing other costly monitoring, possible court cases, and/or support, or simply covering the cost of school lunches?

But "negligent" isn't a binary, and it's not just parents who don't want to, but parents who can't afford to. For a lot of children, easing things a little bit might be all that is needed. For others it might ease things enough that it can be part of a set of relatively light interventions.

For those who genuinely need more heavy handed interventions, it's not a solution, but it's also not in any way detrimental.

Yeah, but in this concrete case we are talking about someone whose parents could have afford it, but didn't to teach the state a lesson or something, but all they(or he) did was made life hell for their son. That is a serious parent fault and someone acting like this here, would likely also act weird with other things.

But like I stated, I am not a fan of child protection service, they can make things worse.

And if school is free, so should be lunch for the students. Apparently people assumed I opposed that here?