I tried it once or twice and it worked well. It's too stupid now to be worth the attempt. The amount of time spent fixing its mistakes has resulted in net zero time savings.

I hope one day my life will settle down enough that I can care for a dog properly.

Thanks, this was really interesting!

I'd say the first option is to simply talk to the mother and offer your help and paint it as a means of helping her out. Keeping the focus on the benefit to the mother and the benefit to the kid as secondary to keep her focused on how it would help her. Sympathize with her situation, she'll be more amenable and that's definitely the easiest way to get a constructive dialog going.

If that fails, involving CPS is still available as a fallback option but.0

That's pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I'm being notified about them now as "new" comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.