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Journal Article Despite efforts to strengthen child support enforcement over the past decades, the level of unpaid child support remains high. High child support arrears create problems for families and states; however, our understanding of how arrears accumulate is limited. Using longitudinal data from Wisconsin administrative records for noncustodial fathers, this article examines patterns of the evolution of child support arrears. We develop a scheme to categorize long-term arrears changes and identify six typical trajectories of arrears evolution that distinguish the timing and pattern of changes in debt…
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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 This qualitative study explores the views that low-income fathers and fatherhood service providers have of the child support system and how these perceptions shape the provision of and men's engagement in fatherhood services. Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted with 36 fathers, and telephone interviews with 19 fatherhood service providers. Four themes emerged about perceptions of the child support system: imposing unrealistic financial demands, criminalizing low-income men, discounting paternal viewpoints, and evidencing responsible parenting. A further four themes were…
Webinar
This NRFC webinar was a follow-up to a March 2013 webinar that began a conversation about ways in which fatherhood practitioners can partner with local child support offices to help non-custodial fathers and their families. This April 2015 webinar continued the conversation with two fatherhood programs that have successfully established effective partnerships with their local child support office.
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The Urban Institute is evaluating the implementation of six Community-Centered Responsible Fatherhood Ex-Prisoner Reentry Pilot Projects funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The projects provide soon-to-be and recently released fathers and their families with an array of responsible parenting, healthy relationship, and economic stability services to help stabilize the fathers and their families. Services offered include parenting and relationship classes, financial literacy workshops, domestic violence services, support groups, family activity days, and case management…
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Journal Article Past child support research has largely focused on cash payments made through the courts (formal support) or given directly to the mother (informal support) almost to the exclusion of a third type: non-cash goods (in-kind support). Drawing on repeated, semistructured interviews with nearly 400 low-income noncustodial fathers, the authors found that in-kind support constitutes about one quarter of total support. Children in receipt of some in-kind support receive, on average, $60 per month worth of goods. Multilevel regression analyses demonstrated that children who are younger and have more…
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Journal Article Despite substantial policy attention to increasing the number of custodial parents with child support orders, the proportion reporting that they are owed child support is falling. Potential explanations for this include increases in shared custody, increases in the number of noncustodial parents who have low incomes (or incomes lower than the custodial parent), and growing discretion to decide whether to participate in the formal child support system. We use data on about 4,000 divorces in Wisconsin that allow us to evaluate these alternative explanations, differentiating between divorces in…
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Journal Article This article discusses experimental tests of two recent administrative interventions, the TANF 16 intervention and the statement intervention, designed to increase child support collections in Washington State. The TANF 16 intervention sought to reimburse the state for TANF benefits paid to custodial parents by intensively pursuing collections in arrears-only cases. The statement intervention tested whether sending regular billing statements to noncustodial parents who were new to the child support system increased compliance. While the TANF 16 intervention's effects represent a substantial…
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Journal Article Promoting the relationships between noncustodial parents and their children has become a federal policy priority. Recent policy proposals aim to achieve this by integrating adjudications of custody and parenting time within proceedings to establish child support. These proposals share several laudable goals, including encouraging the involvement of fathers in their children's lives, increasing compliance with child support orders, and facilitating unmarried parents' access to court processes for resolving custody and visitation disputes. But the simplistic solutions employed by the proposals…
Brief
Child Support is an integral part of the U.S. social welfare landscape, providing billions of dollars to families annually and lessening the depth of poverty for many. Given the vast scale and significance of the U.S. child support system, it is increasingly important to understand the characteristics of parents who enter the system, and further, the characteristics of those who comply with their orders. A deeper understanding of parents’ characteristics and challenges helps to explain system entry and order non-compliance, and in turn, inform the types of supports and services that might be…
