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Journal Article Young, minority, and poorly educated fathers in fragile families have little capacity to support their children financially and are hard-pressed to maintain stability in raising those children. In this article, Robert Lerman examines the capabilities and contributions of unwed fathers, how their capabilities and contributions fall short of those of married fathers, how those capabilities and contributions differ by the kind of relationship the fathers have with their child's mother, and how they change as infants grow into toddlers and kindergartners.Unwed fathers' employment and earnings…
Despite substantial technological improvements to the child support enforcement program, many single parents do not receive child support. Particularly for families whose incomes are below the poverty level, child support is frequently a vital financial resource. The federal government's primary motivation for establishing the federal Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program was to recover the costs associated with public assistance payments to poor single-parent families by collecting payments from the noncustodial parents. In this study, we use variation in the birthing costs over time and…
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Journal Article We present new estimates of unwed fathers' ability to pay child support. Prior research relied on surveys that drastically undercounted nonresident unwed fathers and provided no link to their children who lived in separate households. To overcome these limitations, previous research assumed assortative mating and that each mother partnered with one father who was actually eligible to pay support and had no other child support obligations. Because the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study contains data on couples, multiple-partner fertility, and a rich array of other previously unmeasured…
Noncustodial fathers have an essential role to play--both financially and emotionally--in the lives of their children. However, of the 11 million noncustodial fathers in the US, two thirds do not pay any formal child support. Many of these fathers are poor themselves and face multiple barriers, including low education levels, limited work experience, and criminal records, which impede their success in the labor market as well as their ability to provide for their children.Working Dads: Final Report on the Fathers at Work Initiative presents findings from P/PV's evaluation of Fathers at…
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Journal Article Child support is a critical source of income, especially for the growing proportion of children born to unmarried mothers. Current social policy supports custodial parent employment (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit [EITC] and other work supports have largely taken the place of an entitlement to cash assistance for single mothers of young children). Given many single mothers' limited earnings potential, child support from noncustodial fathers is also important. This raises questions about the effects of child support on custodial mothers' labor supply, and whether policies that increase…
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Journal Article Substantial declines in employment and earnings among disadvantaged men may be exacerbated by child support enforcement policies that are designed to help support families but may have the unintended consequence of discouraging fathers' employment. Disentangling causal effects is challenging because high child support debt may be both a cause and a consequence of unemployment and low child support order compliance. We used childbirth costs charged in unmarried mothers' Medicaid-covered childbirths, from Wisconsin administrative records, as an exogenous source of variation to identify the…
This report presents findings from the demonstration-phase implementation of the Parents' Fair Share program, and early impacts on fathers' earnings and child support payments. In exchange for current and future cooperation with the child support system, a partnership of local organizations offered fathers services designed to help them find better jobs, pay child support, and assume a more paternal role. (Author abstract)
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Journal Article The Family Support Act of 1988 and the 1996 welfare reform act recognized the need to help low-income fathers stay involved with their families, financially as well as emotionally. The laws required states to offer AFDC assistance to two parent families in which the primary wage earner was not employed. They also encouraged states to establish education, employment, and training assistance to noncustodial fathers of low income children so that they could obtain the level of employment needed to fulfill child support obligations. Reform policies have also tried to amend state practices…
Part of a series of fact sheets that discuss how and why the child support program provides innovative services to families across six interrelated areas to assure that parents have the tools and resources they need to support their children and be positively involved in raising them, this fact sheet discusses the dependence of reliable child support payments upon noncustodial parents having stable income. The child support program can increase regular child support payments by helping noncustodial parents find and keep work, and connecting custodial and noncustodial parents to resources that…
Research shows that nearly half of all children born in the US today will be eligible for child support before they reach the age of 18. Many low-income, noncustodial fathers--who often struggle to make these payments--will seek services from workforce development organizations. Yet, understanding the child support enforcement system can be challenging--not only for noncustodial fathers but also for the workforce organizations that want to assist them.
Navigating the Child Support System aims to help meet this challenge by providing information, resources and tools to use at the…
