Child Support Orders Research Articles

Shared placement in nonmarital families: An initial look

AbstractObjectiveWe aim to examine the prevalence of shared placement in nonmarital cases, and we then consider whether and how nonmarital shared placement cases differ from sole mother cases across a variety of case characteristics and child support outcomes.BackgroundIn recent decades, shared placement has become increasingly common after divorce, but less is known about the prevalence of shared placement in nonmarital cases. Shared placement may have important implications for families, and little is known about its prevalence in cases of unmarried parents or about characteristics of nonmarital families that have shared placement arrangements.MethodLeveraging unique administrative data on more than 6,000 nonmarital court cases, we examine the prevalence of shared placement, case characteristics of shared placement compared with sole placement cases, and child support measures by placement type. We use multivariate regression and bivariate analyses.ResultsAlthough sole mother placement remains the norm, data indicate an increase in shared placement arrangements in recent cohorts of nonmarital cases. We find parents with shared placement arrangements tend to be slightly more advantaged across several measures. On average, shared placement cases have lower child support orders and payments and substantively higher compliance rates in the year after petition.ConclusionShared placement is increasing in nonmarital cases in recent years. Nonmarital families who have shared placement arrangements differ in important ways from families with sole mother custody.ImplicationsFindings suggest the importance of expanding the relevant shared placement literature and policy discussion to consider nonmarital cases in addition to divorce cases.

Noncustodial parents, instrumental networks, and child support compliance

Research on child support compliance has focused on the characteristics of noncustodial parents (NCPs) that are associated with compliance, finding that compliance with child support orders is primarily related to the ability to pay support as demonstrated by earnings. Yet, there is evidence linking social support networks to both earnings and noncustodial parents' relationships with children. Using a social poverty framework, we show that relatively few NCPs are completely isolated: most have at least some people in their network who can loan money, provide a place to stay, or provide a ride. We explore whether the size of these instrumental support networks is positively linked to child support compliance both directly and indirectly through earnings. We find evidence of a direct association between instrumental support network size and child support compliance, but no evidence of an indirect association via increased earnings. These findings suggest the importance for researchers and child support practitioners to consider the contextual and relational factors of the social networks in which parents are embedded, and to more thoroughly examine the process by which support from one's network can lead to child support compliance.

“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.

Do Carrots Work Better than Sticks? Results from the National Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration

AbstractMost children in the United States will spend at least part of their childhood living apart from one of their parents; the child support system is designed to ensure that they nonetheless receive financial support. While the system is largely effective when noncustodial parents have substantial regular earnings, many noncustodial parents, including a disproportionate share of those whose children live in poverty, have limited earnings and ability to pay child support. The system's response to nonpayment is primarily “sticks,” that is, threats and punishments. Nonexperimental evaluations of alternative approaches have shown promise. The National Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED), a large‐scale random‐assignment evaluation enrolling more than 10,000 noncustodial parents across 18 locations in eight states, was designed to test the effectiveness of an alternative approach—adjusting child support orders, reducing punitive enforcement, and offering employment and parenting services. We find that CSPED, using carrots in place of sticks, substantially increased the satisfaction of noncustodial parents with child support services, lowered the amount of support owed, and increased noncustodial parents’ sense of responsibility for their children. However, CSPED had limited to no effects on child support compliance, child support payments, or employment outcomes.

Frozen Embryos, Male Consent, and Masculinities

Picture two men facing the possibility of unwanted fatherhood. One man agreed to go through in vitro fertilization with his partner, but years later has changed his mind. Despite the fact that the embryos created through IVF are his partner’s last chance to be a genetic parent, a court allows him to block her use of the embryos. By contrast, another couple’s sexual relationship broke the law. The woman was a legal adult and her partner was a child, under the age of eighteen. Their encounter was thus statutory rape. Her crime led to pregnancy, and after she gave birth, she sued the teenager for child support. Despite his protest that he did not consent to the sexual activity that led to the child’s birth, the court affirms the child support order. As a practical matter, this inconsistency in treatment of unwanted fatherhood may instinctively make sense, applying two different rules for two very different contexts. A deeper examination of the cases, however, reveals much more going on. This Article uses the frame of masculinities theories to dive further into the inconsistency and uncovers two groundbreaking implications that stretch far beyond the specific circumstances. First, the varying treatment of embryo disposition disputes and the characterization of male victims of statutory rape have one constant: a dismissal and rejection of men’s emotions. Second, exploring the inconsistent treatment of men’s consent to become fathers in sexual reproduction versus stored embryos reveals a clear rejection by courts of the personhood concept that embryos are human life. These revelations inform not only how embryo disposition disputes should be resolved, but also fetal personhood and family law’s treatment of fathers.

Too Much, Too Little, or Just Right? Recent Changes to State Child Support Guidelines for Low-Income Noncustodial Parents

There are growing concerns that current child support guidelines may result in “too high” orders likely to go unpaid and resulting in substantial debt. Recent federal legislation reflects these concerns by requiring states to consider the noncustodial parent’s ability to pay when setting child support orders [45 C.F.R. § 302.56(c)(1)(ii)]. However, this legislation leaves states to determine how to balance the economic needs of paying parents and their children. This paper explores how this flexibility affects the extent of variation in order amounts for low-income parents across states. To better understand how states interpret this new ruling and implications for order amounts, we conducted a cross-state comparison of recent changes to state child support guidelines for low-income payors and calculated order amounts for several types of cases. We find that states fall on a spectrum of how they conceive of parental financial responsibility versus parental self-sufficiency in their policy. Some states view noncustodial parents’ responsibilities for their children’s financial needs as secondary to parents’ abilities to meet their own basic needs; others view children’s needs as coming first; and many fall somewhere in between. Our findings add to current understanding of how child support agencies and lawmakers attempt to address the financial needs of low-income families through policy and statute. We find that having generous self-support reserves and no minimum orders allows states to maximize noncustodial parent income. However, if states seek to maximize financial contributions to children, more graduated adjustments to order amounts may be preferable.

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.

What Happens When the Amount of Child Support Due Is a Burden? Revisiting the Relationship between Child Support Orders and Child Support Payments

AbstractChild support policies typically call for noncustodial fathers to provide their children financial support. However, setting orders too high may be counterproductive, resulting in lower pay...

Use of child support enforcement actions and their relationship to payments

Many noncustodial parents do not pay the support they owe. The child support enforcement program has a number of tools to facilitate child support collections in response to nonpayment, such as suspending licenses and holding court hearings. Despite policy interest in raising levels of compliance with child support orders, little recent research exists on the use of enforcement actions or their effectiveness. In this analysis, we provide descriptive statistics on the use of enforcement actions and whether there is a relationship between these actions and beginning to pay. We use state administrative data for a sample of noncustodial fathers in the state of Wisconsin. We find that most nonpaying fathers receive at least one enforcement action during their first nonpayment spell, where the most common action is a letter. Actions beyond letters are relatively infrequent, and almost never used as a first step. Most enforcement actions are associated with beginning to pay support, though suspending licenses is sometimes related to a lower likelihood of beginning to pay. Our analysis is not causal, and so does not provide strong evidence about whether (and when) various enforcement tools should be used. However, it provides new evidence on an understudied question, and a basis for future research on the effectiveness of alternative approaches.

Children’s Gender and Investments from Nonresident Fathers

Evidence suggests that fathers have stronger ties to sons than daughters, which may result in differential investments in their children. This paper investigated whether girls’ gender restricts their access to fathers’ contributions if they do not live together. The data used were the 1994–2008 March/April Match Current Population Survey Child Support Supplements, a large, nationally representative sample which identifies child support eligible mothers of all marital statuses and collects information on nonresident fathers’ financial and social investments in their children. Results for court-mediated outcomes such as the existence and amounts of child support orders showed that courts do not allocate child support differentially by child gender. Small but suggestive effects of child gender were found on fathers’ post-dissolution investments, but these effects disadvantaged boys rather than girls.

Fee Abolition and the Promise of Debt-Free Justice for Young People and Their Families in California

In 2017, Governor Jerry Brown signed landmark bipartisan legislation making California the first state to abolish entire categories of monetary sanctions. Starting January 1, 2018, Senate Bill 190 prohibits counties from charging all administrative fees in the juvenile legal system. SB 190 also repealed county authority to charge certain fees to young people ages 18 to 21 in the criminal legal (adult) system. Senators Holly Mitchell and Ricardo Lara authored SB 190 to “eliminate a source of financial harm to some of the state’s most vulnerable families, support the reentry of youth back into their homes and communities, and reduce the likelihood that youth will recidivate.” California became a national model when it abolished these fees, offering the promise of debt-free justice for young people and their families. This study presents key findings about the implementation of SB 190 and the status of fee reform in California since January 1, 2018. The findings, based on extensive public records and stakeholder interviews, document how counties have gone beyond the requirements of SB 190 to relieve hundreds of thousands of families of more than $237 million in previously assessed fees, and counties have taken further steps to end harmful and racially discriminatory fee practices. However, the study finds that not all counties are complying fully with the new law. Some counties continue to charge SB 190 prohibited fees to families through child support orders and to young adults in the criminal legal system. Some counties have also resisted calls to end all collection activity and continue to pursue more than $136 million in previously assessed fees from California families. The study concludes by recommending concrete actions that county and state officials can take to ensure full compliance with SB 190 and to realize the full benefits of fee abolition.

Getting the Court in Your Business: Unmarried Parents, Institutional Intersectionality, and Establishing Parenting Time Orders in Family Court

AbstractThe child support program reaches half of poor children in the United States, and recent policy proposals would incorporate parenting time into all initial child support orders. Despite the importance and scope of these proposed changes for unmarried parents, research about how parents interpret the decision to set up parenting time orders in family court is limited. Qualitative evidence from individual and group interviews shows that unmarried mothers and fathers perceive family court through competing frames, leading to strategies of either avoidance or engagement with the court system in certain circumstances. Some parents in the study framed family courts as intrusive and opted to stay away from court to avoid unwanted scrutiny by the child welfare and criminal justice systems. In contrast, other parents framed family courts as protective of their families and sought legal help when their child's custody was ambiguous, their child's safety was threatened, or their status in public programs was at stake. These findings are consistent with research on institutional distrust and avoidance but also suggest heterogeneity in unmarried parents’ views of family court as a system that both surveils and safeguards poor families. Findings further demonstrate that unmarried parents view these decisions from a position of institutional intersectionality, or their position at the intersection of multiple state systems that interact with the courts.

A mechanism design approach to child custody allocation in divorce

The paper considers a household family comprising of husband, wife and their child. Each parent consumes a private good and contributes voluntarily for a household public good which is child's welfare. When divorce occurs, the court has an ex ante transfer mechanism for the parents such that truthful revelation of valuation of child's welfare by each parent becomes strategyproof. Based on this, the sole custody of child is assigned to the parent having the highest value. We find that the transfer mechanism of the court fails to satisfy ex post individual rationality of some types of the parents. We also show that the court's mechanism bundled with an appropriate child support order achieves higher child's welfare and satisfies individual rationality only if the non-custodial parent is extremely altruistic in nature. Thus the paper successfully explains widespread prevalence of non-payment of child support from a perspective which was not discussed previously. More significantly, the paper ends with a policy prescription of replacing the conventional child support system by an equivalent amount of transfer from the government to the custodial parent, and shows that it has the potential to correct the intrinsic loopholes of child support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men

In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class men with a high school diploma but no four-year college degree. Between 2000 and 2013, we deployed heterogeneous sampling techniques in the black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We screened to ensure that each respondent had at least one minor child, making sure to include a subset potentially subject to a child support order (because they were not married to, or living with, their child's mother). We interviewed roughly even numbers of black and white men in each site for a total of 107 respondents. Our approach allows us to explore complex questions in a rich and granular way that allows unanticipated results to emerge. These working-class men showed both a detachment from institutions and an engagement with more autonomous forms of work, childrearing, and spirituality, often with an emphasis on generativity, by which we mean a desire to guide and nurture the next generation. We also discuss the extent to which this autonomous and generative self is also a haphazard self, which may be aligned with counterproductive behaviors. And we look at racial and ethnic difference in perceptions of social standing.

Executive Order 13563 Creates Access to Affordable Child Support Orders for Incarcerated Parents

Former President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13563: Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review in his last month of presidency, prohibit- ing States from treating incarceration as voluntary when considering a par- ent’s request for a modification of his or her child support order. Although fully expected to, President Donald Trump has yet to act on the executive order, which right-wing politicians fought vehemently against for two years. This Comment argues that the President should leave the order in action be- cause it will promote payment of child support and relationships between non- custodial parents and their children, as well as help to combat the cycle of incarceration that plagues low-income, noncustodial parents. This Comment also argues that courts should opt to suspend child-support payments for non- custodial parents when they face sentences that will produce significant arrear- ages by the time the parent is released from incarceration. Finally, the Comment will address how incarceration affects modification of support orders and the cycle of incarceration, who is affected by this cycle, and public views as to President Obama’s executive order that attempted to resolve such issues.

Child Support Orders under the Divorce Act, 1985

Although spousal support has evoked extensive commentary in diverse law reviews, child support has attracted relatively little attention. The following analysis is intended to remedy that omission. It provides an up-to-date and comprehensive review of the child support under the Divorce Act, 1985. After writing this paper, the author formulated the following ten basic rules of child support and one forecast.

Comparing income-shares and percentage-of-income child support guidelines

Child support guidelines are one of the most explicit, and consequential, public articulations of parents' obligations to their biological children. States must weigh a variety of policy tradeoffs, including issues of equity, transparency, and simplicity. Many states are shifting to “income-shares” guidelines models from “percentage-of-income” models, citing a perceived increase in equity and flexibility. Given additional complexities in implementing the income-shares model, we ask how often, and for whom, alternative guidelines yield substantially different child support orders. We use state administrative data on matched pairs of divorcing parents to simulate expected order amounts for each type of guideline. We find that, despite substantial differences in the information required to implement alternative models, for most families, adopting a different model would result in only modest changes in the amount of child support due. However, in some instances a different model would result in large changes, particularly for relatively low-income fathers.

Visitation Orders, Family Courts, and Fragile Families

Despite proposals to make parenting time a part of all new child support orders, limited research has examined why some unmarried are more likely than others to establish legal visitation agreements. This mixed‐methods study draws on qualitative data collected from unmarried mothers and fathers living in New York (N = 70) to develop hypotheses about the contexts in which parents set up visitation orders, which are then tested in a large sample of unmarried parents living apart (N = 1,392). Both qualitative and quantitative findings show that disengagement, cooperation, and conflict in the coparenting relationship postseparation influence unmarried parents' decisions about whether to establish a legal visitation agreement. The qualitative data further illustrate how parents' distrust of the court system, preference for informal agreements, and uncertainty about the custody of nonmarital children inform their decisions. The article concludes by considering approaches for helping low‐conflict coparents set up visitation agreements outside of family court.

How accurate are imputed child support orders?

Child support agencies face the challenging task of setting right-sized orders when the non-custodial parent's income cannot be ascertained through state or federal administrative records and the non-custodial parent is unwilling or unable to provide documentation of recent income. In these cases, child support agencies will often impute the non-custodial parent's income assuming their earnings are equal to those of someone who works full-time at the minimum wage. This study uses detailed earnings and hours worked data for employees in Washington state to assess how well this imputation matches the actual earnings of low-wage non-custodial parents. Our results reveal that this imputation would likely set orders that are too high or too low for the majority of non-custodial parents with no income information. The findings suggest the need for child support agencies to move away from a “one-size fits all” imputation approach and develop strategies to better monitor non-custodial parents to determine whether an order modification is necessary.