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Mr. Redmond's view of differential response and other methods to sort issues of poverty out of formal child protection investigations is troubling and extraordinarily short-sighted, especially given his wealth of experience working with runaway and homeless youth. I have a great deal of respect for the work of Spectrum Youth Services, and indeed many of the transitional housing and basic centers programs nationwide. Such programs allow young people who've been disenfranchised by nearly everyone to use solid programming and support to capitalize on their own industriousness. Many of these young people will use such access to move on to a better economic future, advanced education, and build families of their own. But the given economic reality of the wages many will be qualified to earn and the cost of living, making ends meet will be a life-long struggle. And of course, they won’t have access to all the opportunities to move up the corporate ladder and improve their income available to their more wealthy, well-connected peers. This means that many of these young people will experience poverty, low-wages, and encounter various public assistance systems. Despite that, many of the young people served by the runaway and homeless youth programs will be grow up to experience the joy of being mothers, aunts, wives, fathers, uncles, and husbands. Under the traditional child welfare system advocated by Mr. Redmond, these families, headed by former foster homeless youth and former homeless youth (the youth served at Spectrum, for example) are the most likely adults to face child protection involvement with their own children, nieces, and nephews. Wouldn’t we all want the professionals at the front-lines of the child welfare system to recognize the strengths that they bring to the table and apply community resources appropriately to help them keep their family intact? Or should we assume that once these young people grow up and start their own families that they will reach the doors of the child welfare system as potential predators? Let’s agree also not to distort the meaning of “non-investigation assessment” for sensationalist purposes. This does not mean that family problems are being ignored. It is quite the opposite. Identified problems are being appropriately matched with services such as affordable housing, job training, child care vouchers, education liaisons, car repairs, budgeting, and family counseling. Is Mr. Redmond suggesting that foster care is an appropriate response to poverty or that entry into the central registry of abuse is a step toward a better economic future? Let’s agree to recognize these parents as people who, like ourselves, are trying to make ends meet under daily economic uncertainty - only with less social capital to buffer their children from the effects of these struggles. How would we want to be treated if we ended up at the department of children services in our community? How would we want the young people in the runaway and homeless youth system to be served as parents? If we can’t imagine ourselves on the other side of the front desk, perhaps we could put ourselves in the shoes of the worker. Do we really believe that that a professional child welfare worker would willingly send a child home to his death? Mr. Redmond’s piece implies that the state would actively encourage front-line workers to ignore high-risk families in order to balance the budget. This is ridiculous. However, if such an order came down from a child welfare commissioner an individual child welfare worker would not comply. No. I’m sorry. They wouldn’t. No more than I would. No more than Mr. Redmond would. Prediction is at best an inexact science but when a child dies in their home or in foster care, it isn’t because a worker or a child welfare commissioner agreed to let it happen. Better services and screening for families in economic distress to sort them out of child welfare would allow for more time, attention, and quality out-of-home placement options for children who must be separated from their families in order to be safe, to thrive, and to ultimately find loving, permanent homes – and at the risk of being as hyperbolic as recent reports from Every Child Matters – to stay alive.

While attitudes and beliefs are very important, what's more important is looking at whether these attitudes and beliefs are actually being reflected in behavior.

95% of Americans have sex prior to getting married, and this is not just amongst teens and twenty-somethings.  People are just less likely to have shotgun weddings when they get "caught" (i.e. pregnant) than they used to be.  I'm guessing that the majority of parents who said they are either opposed or somewhat opposed to premarital sex had sex prior to marriage themselves. 

"Do as I say and not as I do" doesn't help anyone.