When is it bad enough?

Spent the last several days at my sister's house, babysitting her new puppies, two Yorkies that are about 4 months old. I'll have to remember what pains in the ass they were if I ever get the urge again to buy a puppy. I told her next time she goes away to leave the kids and take the dogs instead. As incredibly cute as the puppies are, at least the kids are potty trained and don't try to eat everything in sight, including their own shit.

Turns out she didn't even have that great of a time visiting our other sister, the one that no longer talks to me. We're now taking bets on how long it will be until our older sister ends up on the news with the following headline...

State Takes Custody of Kids Living In Several Feet of Filth

Seems our older sister and her family don't bother to clean the house, ever. Guess I should be glad I'm never invited over there because from the description I got, I wouldn't be able to stay more than half an hour without fleeing in horror to find the nearest shower where I can scrub my skin with a Brillo pad and then find some place to burn whatever clothes I had on. It's that disgusting. Some rooms are so full of crap that you can't walk in them. The kitchen table looked like it hadn't been cleaned in six months. The dust was a good half an inch thick. Someone crapped on the bathroom rug and instead of cleaning it up, they left it there for someone else to step in and it still wasn't cleaned up. And those are just a couple of the lovely highlights I was given.

What I find frustrating, besides the delusion they hide behind in thinking that they are saner than I am, is that my brother-in-law makes bank as an engineer (he currently designs high-tech surgical instruments). They have always lived in huge, gorgeous houses that they have always destroyed. If they're spending at least half a million on a house, couldn't they hire a maid to come in once a week? Couldn't they hire a contractor to do the home improvement projects they start but never finish?

Of course they shouldn't have to hire a maid. My sister is a stay-at-home mom and the kids are more than old enough to help out (they're 13, 12, 9 and 7) if she doesn't want to clean everything herself. Even with four kids she certainly can't claim she's too busy. The kids aren't involved in any activities outside the home. Heck, they're barely involved in any activities inside the home besides reading and playing with their Game Boys unless you count fighting, whining and crying as activities. These are the same kids that she pulled out of school because the two oldest were being picked on for being overweight. Rather than helping them lose weight or teaching them how to deal with the other kids, she chose instead to further alienate and isolate them...wise choice there sis.

I just keep wondering, at what point is it bad enough that if I call DCFS on her, will they actually get involved and do anything to help these kids? How dirty and cluttered does the house have to be? Can she get in trouble for failing to educate her kids, something she has admitted she rarely bothers to do, when her state doesn't require any kind of reporting for home-schooled kids? She isn't beating them as far as anyone knows, though she does scream and verbally abuse them which I think is far more damaging. They aren't being denied the necessities. They do have food on the table, a roof over their heads and clothes on their backs.

The kids don't deserve the life they're stuck living with my sister as their mother. The woman needs some serious psychological help and until she gets it, her kids will pay the price everyday. You'd think their father would step up and say that everything going on is unacceptable, but for some reason he doesn't bother. That's because he's in denial that there even is a problem, he's just as much a part of the problem as my sister is or he's afraid my sister will just scream at him and he's too much of a wuss to stand up to her. Hell, it could be all three.

If I say anything to them, I know they'll just outright say something like "You don't know what the hell you're talking about. You're mentally ill, why the fuck would we listen to anything a crazy person has to say?". If anyone else says anything, my sister will just get mad at them, never talk to them again and still nothing will change. How can someone in our family step up and be the voice of sanity to save these kids that are trapped in an unhealthy world without it falling on deaf ears? If she was physically abusing them, the answer would be easy and obvious.