Melissa Harris-Perry's 'Uncontroversial Comment' About Children If you send your children to public school, are they still your children? If you trust that should they fall off their bike while riding along on the sidewalk in front of the neighbor's house, he might run out with a Band-Aid, is that the end of the nuclear family? Does taking support for those children, in the form of the Children's Health Insurance Program, Head Start or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, mean you have you ceded your place as mother or father to the collective? Most of us would say not. But when MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry made what she called "an uncontroversial comment" about our societal responsibility for our nation's children, she was met with a barrage of criticism. In a "Lean Forward" advertising spot for her network, she says: We have never invested as much in public education as we should have. We haven't had a very collective notion of, these are our children. We have to break through our private idea that children belong to their parents, or children belong to their families, and recognize that children belong to whole communities. Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the household's, we start making better investments. As Mary Elizabeth Williams writes for Salon ("Melissa Harris-Perry Doesn't Want to Steal Your Children"), those seemingly innocuous words about investing in children served as a red flag to some observers, who read into the idea that we should invest more in public education an attack on the nuclear family and the role of parents. That's ordinary partisan rhetoric, of course, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating. One of the biggest challenges for families today is our national "every man for himself" philosophy - one that leaves every parent individually searching for solutions to problems that we all share about our children's health and daily care, and the challenge, in and of itself, need not be partisan. Most Americans, most politicians, most pundits would surely agree that if America is going to invest in anything, it should be our children and their future. Few would suggest that children aren't a part of our communities, or don't merit our support. It's how to provide that support and investment that we disagree on, and that disagreement needs airing and discussion for there to be any change. But when even the suggestion that we could make better collective investments in our youth can become a flashpoint for the rhetoric of division, the conversation about how we can better support families and care for our children becomes one we're even less likely to have.