Child Support Enforcement Research Articles

Empowering Single Parents: Navigating Socio-Economic Challenges and Fostering Resilience in Family Well-being

Single-parent households represent a diverse and growing family structure in contemporary society, often facing unique socio-economic challenges. This research seeks to comprehensively examine the role of single parents in meeting the socio-economic needs of their families, with a particular focus on the well-being of both parents and children. Through a mixed-methods approach encompassing quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, and an extensive review of existing literature, this study aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the complexities and resilience demonstrated by single-parent households. Our findings reveal that single parents employ a variety of coping strategies, including meticulous financial planning, seeking education and job opportunities, and building robust support networks. These strategies are essential in navigating the financial stress, time constraints, and emotional strain often associated with single parenthood. Moreover, children in single-parent households often exhibit resilience through adaptive thinking, effective emotion regulation, and seeking support from trusted adults. Quantitative analyses indicate that academic achievement and reported stress levels in single-parent households may differ slightly from those in two-parent households. However, it is essential to consider that these outcomes are influenced by numerous factors beyond household structure, including income levels and parental involvement. Furthermore, our research underscores the significance of accessible support systems, including government assistance programs, community organizations, and family networks, in alleviating these challenges. In light of these findings, this research proposes a series of policy changes and interventions aimed at improving the socio-economic well-being of single-parent households. These include strengthening child support enforcement, expanding access to affordable childcare, increasing investments in affordable housing, and enhancing education and job training programs tailored to single parents' unique needs. In conclusion, the socio-economic well-being of single-parent households is a multifaceted and vital concern in contemporary society. By recognizing the diverse strengths and challenges these families face and implementing inclusive policies and support systems, we can empower single parents and their children to thrive. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of single-parent dynamics and resilience while offering actionable recommendations to enhance their socio-economic prospects and foster a more inclusive future for all families.

‘We support child support:’ American women’s activism through the association for children for enforcement of support, 1984–2005

ABSTRACT In the United States, the fair and efficient enforcement of child support obligations has long posed challenges to all levels of government, often to the detriment of single-mother families. This article traces the local-to-national activism of the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES), one of the largest child support enforcement organizations in the country. Established in Toledo, Ohio, and comprised overwhelmingly of women, it demanded an end to unsympathetic characterizations of mother-led families as deviant, while simultaneously working to increase the stigma surrounding those who evaded child support – the so-called ‘Deadbeat Dads.’ Examining ACES’ work provides insight into ways in which women’s organizations drew from both conservative and liberal ideas, as well as creative activism, to gain bipartisan support for stricter enforcement of child support from 1984 to 2005. Confronted with the complexities of federalism, ACES did not fully achieve its goal for a federalized support collections system through the US Internal Revenue Service; nonetheless, its lobbying efforts played a significant role in transforming court-ordered child support in the US from a largely nonobligatory system to one where payment was more systematically enforced.

Temporary Assistance For Needy Families: Sanctioning And Child Support Compliance Among Black Families In Illinois.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a federal cash welfare program for low-income, working families with children in the United States that requires participation with child support enforcement, if one parent is noncustodial, to receive the cash benefit. Cash assistance has been linked to improved child health and academic achievement, but sanctions to benefits can increase health risks. Our community-engaged, mixed-methods research project sought to identify barriers to TANF among families with young children in Illinois. In this study we analyzed TANF sanctions related to child support enforcement, using analysis of TANF administrative data and semistructured interviews with TANF customers. We conducted logistic regression and Fisher's test to explore demographic differences in sanctioning and sanction types. Black families were 111percent more likely than White families to receive at least one sanction in 2018-19. Black families who were enrolled in TANF received more sanctions for child support noncompliance (2018: 42percent; 2019: 50percent) than White families (2018: 30percent; 2019: 34percent). Mothers who were survivors of intimate partner violence voiced particular challenges with child support compliance. Policy recommendations include shifting to alternative cash assistance models and removing pass-through funding so that families receive the full child support benefit.

The Women's Rights Lobby in the Gender Gap Congress, 1983-84

This paper analyzes the successes and failures of the women's right lobby during the 98th Congress, when the media made the "gender gap" a political watchword and legislators were unusually anxious to show support for women's issues. A similarly favorable climate had existed ten years earlier, but the women's interest groups were new to lobbying, had little coordination and were unable to attract coalition partners among more established groups. This time they had the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues as a liaison to over 100 House members, an agreed agenda called the Economic Equity Act and 165 allied organizations making up the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights. By playing the gender gap the Caucus and women lobbyists were able to win enactment of pension reform and child support enforcement legislation. While the gender gap is no longer in the headlines, some momentum has been retained.

Child support by an imprisoned parent

This article presents the results of the study on selected aspects of child support by an imprisoned parent. The study was based on the analysis of the existing data which included reports published by the Ministry of Justice and the organizational units of the Prison Service. Using the gathered data, a socio-demographic characteristic of imprisoned persons obliged to pay child support has been prepared. Furthermore, posts on several online forums were also treated as the existing data for this study. Their analysis made it possible to, among others, determine what types of problems in connection with child support by an imprisoned parent were perceived by the other parent taking custody of the child. It has been shown that on average, every fifth imprisoned person (in a penitentiary or remand centre) is obliged to pay child support. Among those persons, a clear and growing share is that of persons convicted of not paying child support. It has been found that incarceration does not really help with executing child support payments. Over 50% of imprisoned persons obliged to pay child support has no possibility to earn money. For those who work for remuneration, on account of child support payments, the amounts are deducted several times less than the amount of the average child support in the country. It has also been recognized that some parents do not know how to sue the other incarcerated parent for child support or do not want to apply for alimony because, for example, they believe that they will thus worsen the situation of the incarcerated parent. In conclusion it was stated the child support enforcement only at the imprisonment stage is a delayed action. Furthermore, author’s doubts are also raised regarding the decision to incarcerate persons for the offense of non-alimony, among others, due to the high costs of maintaining prisoners, and because of the stigmatizing nature of imprisonment sanctions.

“A Helping Hand over a Heavy Hand”: Child Support Enforcement in the Era of COVID-19

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic forced human services agencies to adapt quickly to the economic realities faced by their customers. For child support agencies, the pandemic raised difficult questions about how strenuously agencies should enforce child support orders during periods of economic crisis and uncertainty. Drawing on interviews with agency and court staff, this study explores staff’s perceptions of pandemic-related effects on parents’ abilities to work and pay, how and why enforcement practices changed during the pandemic, and changes staff expect to persist. Agency staff reported a pause on enforcement at the pandemic’s outset, followed by leniency, flexibility, caution, and empathy in their practices.

Valuation ruptures: Breaking and remaking notions of ‘good’ in a US government agency

The flourishing literature of valuation studies has shown how values are enacted and temporarily settled through sociomaterial processes, highlighting the contestations and dissonances inherent in valuing. We extend this concern through a study of a sudden collapse and reconstruction of value – what counts as good – in a US government agency. Using ethnographic case study methods, we explore how the US Child Support Enforcement Program’s performance measures breached a state agency’s operational framework and disrupted its understanding of good performance. Following the traces left behind by the measures, we demonstrate how actors and devices formed new networks of value, transforming the agency from one of the worst to one of the most outstanding performers in the nation. At the same time, new and unexpected notions of ‘good’ emerge. We transpose the notion of rupture from micro-sociological theory to show the collective efforts involved in making a sudden disruption and realignment of values.

Imagining a new future: elimination of child support obligations for child welfare-involved families

ABSTRACT As we imagine the next generation of public child welfare, efforts to identify and eliminate practices that are harmful to families must be pursued. This commentary uses available research evidence to argue against child support enforcement for child welfare-involved families. Although research on this topic is sparse, the evidence from the few available studies suggests that child support enforcement likely harms child welfare-involved families. It delays reunification, increases family financial precarity, is cost ineffective, and is anathema to the values of family support. Federal policies that require or encourage referral of child welfare-involved families to child support agencies should be eliminated to better promote family strengths and cohesion.

No Unnecessary Burden: Taxpayers and the Politics of Work, Family, and Welfare

The history of the Social Security Amendments of 1967 illuminates the contours of fiscal citizenship. This watershed law created both work requirements for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients and new policy instruments, including federal child support enforcement, to compel poor men to fulfill their financial obligations to their families. Welfare reformers claimed that such changes were necessary to protect the rights of taxpayers against the “criminal” predations of welfare recipients. These policy changes initiated in 1967 redefined poor women's non-work, as well as their sexual and reproductive decisions, as crimes against taxpayers. Welfare recipients contested this logic and the policies that flowed from it by insisting on the value of their own domestic labor and rejecting a narrow view of taxpaying citizenship. The resolution of these questions played a critical role in revising the American social contract.

Uneasy partnerships: Prisoner re-entry, family problems and state coercion in the era of neoliberalism

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of prisoner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering individuals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on problems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protective services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state. Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the strains faced by former prisoners' households and the tactics they used to deal with them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements.

The Right Tool for the Job: Child Support Enforcement Tools and Their Relationship to Payments

ABSTRACT Child support staff have an array of tools to use when noncustodial parents fail to pay. Drawing on staff interviews, this analysis examines staff perspectives on when and how to enforce; practice transitions; and best practices. Findings indicate that caseworkers have some discretion in selecting and sequencing tools. Discretion helps workers adapt to circumstances, but also leads to differences in parents’ experiences. Over time, agencies have shifted culture and practices to align with family needs. Consequently, staff roles have extended beyond collections into providing services that identify address compliance barriers. Implications for staffing, leadership, services and policy are discussed.

The female payer: Gender differences in characteristics among child support payers.

Nonresident mothers who formally pay child support are becoming increasingly prevalent. If the profile of female payers differs from that of men or if their payment is motivated differently, existing gender-based child support policies and enforcement strategies face significant challenges. This study uses the payment framework of male compliance to map the differences between male and female payers of child support. The analysis applies discriminant analysis to a combination of register and fiscal data of separated parents. Whereas the separate aspects of the payment framework did not reach the threshold for acceptable discrimination, the full model revealed considerable differences between male and female payers. The aspect of willingness to pay showed the greatest discriminating power, suggesting that paying mothers have a higher willingness to do so than fathers. We conclude that while the discrepancies between nonresident mothers and fathers who pay child support can be partly attributed to demographic differences and residency patterns of children, differing motivations are also of importance.

Child Support Enforcement, Poverty, and the Creation of the New Debtor’s Prison

Child Support Enforcement, Poverty, and the Creation of the New Debtor’s Prison

Child Support Enforcement and Infants Health Outcomes

This paper explores the potential externality of enforcements in child support policies on infants’ health outcomes. Exploiting the variations in child support policies across states and over the year and using the universe of birth records in the US (1975-2004), I document that the policies were effective in improving birth outcomes. Infants born to single mothers in states that fully adopt child support policies have on average 38 grams higher birth weight and 99 basis points lower likelihood of being born with low birth weight. These effects hold for a wide range of health outcomes. The marginal impacts are larger for mothers in states above-median changes in child support policies and for mothers who reside in poorer states. The results suggest that a higher quantity of prenatal care and better timing of prenatal care could be possible mechanisms of impact. This study contributes to the existing literature by providing the first evidence of health externality of child support policies for infants’ health outcomes.

Child Support Enforcement and Child Mortality

ABSTRACT This paper explores the potential benefit of enforcements in Child Support policies to child mortality rates. Exploiting the sharp changes in Child Support laws across states and over the years 1975–1993, we find that adoption of a full set of policies reduces the child death rate by 23% relative to the mean. The results are robust across multiple subsamples and a variety of specifications. Three potential mechanisms of impact include better health utilization during the prenatal period, improved birth outcomes, and moving towards better-quality health insurance for children.

Child support receipt among divorced mothers in Korea: Changes after the 2007 policy reform

• Korea recently implemented a child support (CS) system, but there is little research on policy impacts. • A 2007 policy stated that divorcing couples must develop a CS obligation agreement. • Multivariate logit analyses were conducted using data from single mothers in Korea. • Results did not provide consistent evidence regarding the effect of the policy reform on CS receipts. • Policy success may depend on clear guidelines and the enforcement of CS agreements. The literature on child support policy has focused primarily on the United States and other Western countries that have previously established formal child support enforcement systems. There is limited knowledge about either the ways in which countries with different cultures have introduced child support policies or the effectiveness of these policies. Most Asian countries do not have an explicit child support policy; Korea is an example of an Asian country that has recently begun to institutionalize child support policy via a set of legal changes. This paper empirically examines whether child support receipt increased among divorced single mothers following the enactment of the first national child support policy in Korea, a 2007 law mandating that divorcing couples agree on the child support obligations of noncustodial parents. Using multivariate logit models to analyze cross-sectional data from a nationally representative sample of 1,045 divorced mothers who were residing in Korea in 2012, we compare child support receipts between single mothers who divorced before and after the policy change, while controlling for heterogeneity among mothers and their families as well as the time elapsed between divorce and the survey. The results did not provide consistent evidence that the policy reform increased child support receipt among divorced single mothers in Korea, but limited evidence suggests the possibility of at least some short-term increase in receipt following the reform. The results also provide some evidence of a policy effect among mothers with limited education. The implications of the results for Korea and other areas of the world are discussed.

Targeted child support enforcement and its association with child support payments: Evidence from a program evaluation

Abstract The Child Support Recovery Unit (CSRU) within the Iowa Department of Human Services is responsible for establishing and enforcing child support orders across the state. As part of a comprehensive effort to actualize services, CSRU and university partners developed and evaluated a positive family support model to maintain relationships with non-custodial parents. This article describes the evolution of the programming and examines the association between targeted child support enforcement initiative (termed Projecting Positivity Promotes Positivity and Cultural Change or Px4C2) and non-custodial parents’ support payments. We use the difference-in-differences framework to estimate the intervention effects on non-custodial parents’ child support. Results from the program evaluation model and payment data suggest a positive association with increased child support payments by 25 dollars on average and a 6.1 percentage point increase in the ratios of child support payments to child support dues. Results suggest that while this new approach was associated with increases for all non-custodial parents, the association was stronger for those who did not have a formal child support enforcement measure or mechanism in place prior to the intervention.

Child Support and the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid Expansions

AbstractA quickly developing literature has shown that the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid expansions have improved health insurance coverage, health, and financial well‐being among low‐income adults without dependent children. This population includes noncustodial parents. With substantial overlap in the population that is typically obligated to pay child support and the population that has strongly benefited from the expansions, there may be potential implications for child support enforcement. In this paper, I examine the effect of public health insurance eligibility to low‐income adults on child support outcomes. I find that the ACA Medicaid expansions increased child support distributed to custodial families as arrears by 8.5 percent. Evidence also suggests current support distributions increased by about 2 percent. There were no significant effects on paying toward a child support order. Among unmarried mothers, the likelihood of child support receipt increased by 8 percent. These results imply that access to public health insurance can increase the ability of noncustodial parents to pay child support.

Working to Avoid Incarceration: Jail Threat and Labor Market Outcomes for Noncustodial Fathers Facing Child Support Enforcement

Child support enforcement is among several contexts in which work requirements are enforced by incarceration for noncompliance. Rather than creating barriers to employment, such incarceration threats may pressure subjects to work more, under worse conditions. We test for this using Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study data on respondents’ child support, labor market, and criminal justice experiences in twenty cities. We exploit intercity variation in absolute and relative reliance on different child support enforcement techniques, especially punitive ones, such as incarceration, versus financially extractive ones, such as wage garnishment. As predicted, heavier reliance on incarceration sanctions is associated with more hours of work and lower wages among noncustodial fathers most vulnerable to incarceration.

Child Support Enforcement and Child Mortality

This paper explores the potential benefit of enforcement in Child Support policies to child mortality rates. Exploiting the sharp changes in Child Support laws across states and over the years 1975-1993, we find that adoption of a full set of policies reduces the child death rate by 23% relative to the mean. The results are robust across multiple sub-samples and a variety of specifications. Three potential mechanisms of impact include better health utilization during the prenatal period, improved birth outcomes, and moving toward better-quality health insurance for children.