Michigan must remain sensitive to these situations while not allowing support to become a crutch on which people rely indefinitely to avoid taking responsibility for their own fate.

The family is the focus of our lives and ultimately each of us must accept personal responsibility for our actions. Michigan's families must be preserved and the role of family must be strengthened.

Perhaps the best example of this concept is Families First, a program of short-term but very intensive counseling. It has become a national model, exemplified by the emphasis it received in the recent Bill Moyers television special of the same name. Similar programs are appearing in many other states, working with families who are facing sever crises and are at risk of losing their children.

The good news is that it works! The premise: remove the risk, not the child. We all know that children love their parents--they want to stay with their parents--and to remove a child, even to an excellent foster home, hurts deeply and may do irreparable harm.

Families First has now been expanded to 68 Michigan counties and will be available everywhere in Michigan by September 1992. And we are developing similar programs which provide alternatives to strengthen family bonds and provide brighter futures for children.

Other family-preservation efforts are also under way in Michigan. Through interagency collaboration, programs are being developed or expanded for families of emotionally or mentally disturbed children, of delinquent or troubled youth, and for the return to their families of youth who are in residential care or family foster care.

Families also need our support in other areas. For instance, even though Michigan consistently leads the nation in the amount of child support collected from absent parents, we can do better! We are exploring new options to ensure that each child receives the appropriate financial support from both parents. Without child support, many single parents cannot achieve self-sufficiency on one paycheck and must rely on public assistance.

I will support proposals to more aggressively pursue the payment of child support obligations, including:

• Requiring that child support orders be reported to credit bureaus as a financial obligation.
• Requiring hospitals to accept and record acknowledgment of paternity at the time of birth.
• Denying or revoking professional, business, or trade licenses for persons with child-support arrearages or who do not have an approved payment plan.
• Withholding vehicle registration upon notice from a Friend of the Court that a non-custodial parent is delinquent in meeting the child-support obligation.
• Authorizing employers to withhold child support obligations from paychecks of new employees immediately.
• Assuring that children are included in the health-care plans of parents with child-support obligations.

There are two efforts under way to combat the unacceptably high infant mortality rate in Michigan. The first is a program operated by the health department in each county to screen young children for ailments which require early treatment. Even though the program has been in existence for several years, we plan to expand our outreach and our Communities First pilots should work aggressively toward 100 percent coverage of eligible children.

The second is the expansion of our Maternal and Infant Support Services, a Medicaid program for pregnant mothers and presently for young children up to two months of age. With the support of the legislature we hope to expand to include children up to age one to assure that parents meet the nutritional, developmental and health needs of their children.