The school physician, together with the school nurse, has special opportunities to detect situations of distress in children, because of his or her contacts with the children themselves, teachers, community social workers and child welfare agencies, family physicians, hospitals, juridical agencies, and families. Follow-up of reported cases shows that abused children often fail to receive the consideration they deserve and that the attention they need is often deflected towards the parents and their problems. Too often, the decision not to break up the family transforms the child into a tool and into a test of parental rehabilitation. The child's incontrovertible right to normal growth and development requires that stable protective solutions outside a severely deleterious family environment be more often and more quickly considered.