Other
For parents who have court orders to pay child support, the financial outlook may be especially bleak due to COVID-19-related job loss compounded by enforcement of child support orders. If child support orders cannot be modified in a timely manner to reflect job loss, parents can quickly build child support debt and become subject to non-compliance penalties. Changes to current child support practices and policies can improve parents’ ability and willingness to pay support when they recover from the COVID-19 recession.
Brief
The central goal of child support policy must be child well-being. Child support policies designed to maximize child well-being can increase financial and other resources available to children, help remove barriers to consistent child support payment, increase employment retention among noncustodial fathers with support orders, support noncustodial parental engagement, and facilitate healthy co-parenting. Unprecedented levels of job loss, economic instability, and family isolation during the pandemic have raised the child support policy stakes for fathers, families, and communities.
Brief
In fiscal year 2018, noncustodial parents were obligated to pay nearly $33.6 billion in current child support on behalf of the 15 million children served by the Title IV-D child support program. One-third of that, or $11 billion, was not collected. Unemployment is the leading reason for non-payment of child support by noncustodial parents. This brief will explore the opportunities at the state and federal levels to provide employment services to noncustodial parents and increase child support payments in the process.
Brief
An essential step in the child support process is delivering legal documents to the person named as a parent. This infographic summarizes results from a Georgia intervention that aimed to get parents to come in and accept documents voluntarily instead of using a sheriff or process server to deliver them. (Author abstract)
Brief
The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project is an ambitious effort to apply behavioral science principles to improving services related to child care, child support, and work support. As is the case with most behavioral research, the BIAS project focuses on individual client behavior. This approach provides significant benefits by allowing for low-cost, incremental improvements that can accumulate over time. One extension to this individual-level approach would be to consider the behavior of individual staff members who work with those clients. Another beneficial…
Brief
A father’s incarceration can represent a serious threat toeconomic stability for his children and family, yet little isknown about earnings and child support payments among justice-involved men over the course of incarceration and release. This analysis uses state administrative and survey data from participants in five states to examine this gap. (Author abstract)
Brief
In child support programs, parents must often make complicated decisions with little information in a context where emotions can run high. Such situations can affect both the quality and speed of decision making. Behavioral science can ameliorate some of the impact that such environments might have on decision making, while also providing a new way of thinking about questions that child support staff often confront, such as: Why do some parents fail to attend order establishment hearings (where a child support amount can be set), or forget to bring paperwork that would help with the…
Brief
The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) team designed and implemented 15 tests of low-cost behavioral interventions to improve the efficacy of key U.S. poverty alleviation policies using rigorous randomized controlled trials. The author reports that behavioral nudges (defined as subtle and modest changes that help improve individual decision making), reminders, or information are not sufficient to have large impacts on child support compliance when individuals don’t have the financial resources to comply or don’t view the required payments to be “legitimate.” The…
Brief
This research snapshot from the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project presents findings from the Cuyahoga tests, which demonstrate that low-cost, low-effort behavioral interventions can improve child support outcomes. However, interventions that are more intensive may be necessary to increase overall child support collection amounts, perhaps because some parents have a limited ability to pay. (Author abstract modified)
Brief
The federal government created the child support program in the 1970s to secure financial and medical support for children whose parents live separately. Today, the program collects $32 billion per year in child support payments and serves more than 16 million children and families. Still, about 35 percent of child support obligations go unpaid each month. Parents who do not pay often lack the ability to do so, due to unemployment, disability, incarceration, or other (sometimes multiple) barriers. These parents leave a significant amount of child support unpaid, and collecting that support…
