Child Support Policy Research Articles

Gender Equality Prior to and Following Separation: Nordic and Liberal Policy Inconsistencies

AbstractWe compare family policy in Australia and Finland, focusing on child support as interrogating how gender equality ideals and realities play out when families diverge from the dual-parent model. Despite Finland’s de-gendered leave and employment policy, a gender wage gap continues to position mothers as primary carers. In Australia, pre-separation policies are gendered in that leave benefits position mothers as primary carers. In both countries, child support policy took the opposite approach. Finland’s child support policy provides less incentive for the father to take care of children post-separation.

The Effect of Child Support on Selection into Marriage and Fertility

This paper studies the expansion of US child support policies from 1977 to 1992 and its consequences for marriage and fertility decisions. I develop a model showing that child support enforces ex a...

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.

Technical Fixes as Challenges to State Legitimacy: Australian Separated Fathers’ Suggestions for Child Support Policy Reform

Abstract This article assesses fathers’ evidence presented to an Australian inquiry into the child support scheme. We examine these data in order to address how fathers’ proposed child support policy solutions compared against Eekelaar’s critique of parents’ moral responsibilities to children and his identification of three substitute social bases for parents’ continued support. We find that despite the inquiry’s technical remit, fathers’ solutions challenged the very basis of child support as maintaining, reinforcing, or redressing their responsibilities to children. Here, we illustrate that such procedures may be unable to contain fundamental challenges to state legitimacy when dealing with contested social issues.

Ethnic Disparities in Childhood Prevalence of Maltreatment: Evidence From a New Zealand Birth Cohort.

Objectives. To document ethnic disparities in childhood abuse and neglect among New Zealand children.Methods. We followed the 1998 New Zealand birth cohort of 56 904 children through 2016. We determined the cumulative childhood prevalence of reports to child protective services (CPS), substantiated maltreatment (by subtype), and out-of-home placements, from birth to age 18 years, by ethnic group. We also developed estimates stratified by maternal age and community deprivation levels.Results. We identified substantial ethnic differences in child maltreatment and child protection involvement. Both Māori and Pacific Islander children had a far greater likelihood of being reported to CPS, being substantiated as victims, and experiencing an out-of-home placement than other children. Across all levels of CPS interactions, rates of Māori involvement were more than twice those of Pacific Islander children and more than 3 times those of European children.Conclusions. Despite long-standing child support policies and reparation for breaches of Indigenous people's rights, significant child maltreatment disparities persist. More work is needed to understand how New Zealand's public benefit services can be more responsive to the needs of Indigenous families and their children.

Compensation for Households with Children in Croatia, Slovenia and Austria

We assess the level and distribution of compensation for households with children provided by child support policies in Croatia, Slovenia and Austria. The child support policies in which we are interested include child and large family benefits, subsistence and housing benefits, and tax relief for dependent children. Using a microsimulation technique of “policy importing”, we show that the adequacy and evenness of the Croatian child support could be substantially improved if Croatia’s current policies were replaced by their Slovenian and Austrian equivalents. We propose improved versions of Verbist and Van Lancker’s (Soc Indic Res 128(3):1299–1318, 2016) indicator of horizontal equity in the sense of construction, aggregation to the population level and interpretation.

How cultural and policy contexts interact with child support policy: A case study of child support receipt in Korea and the United States

In the last few decades, nations across the world have placed greater emphasis on finding ways to increase child support receipt among single-parent families. However, there is very little empirical evidence about whether and how national strategies to increase child support collection should differ based on cultural and policy contexts. Much of the extant research has examined the correlates of child support receipt within a given nation (mostly the United States), while few studies have employed a cross-national comparative perspective to examine child support correlates. The current study compares child support correlates in Korea and the United States, two countries that have certain similarities in economic conditions and welfare arrangements but differ in cultural and policy contexts that may affect child support receipt. We conduct logit analysis using a sample of 3178 custodial single-mother families (1111 Korean and 2067 U.S. mothers) drawn from two national-level data sources representative of single-mother families residing in Korea and the United States, respectively. The results suggest that cultural and policy contexts have an important influence on child support receipt via their effect on child support correlates. For example, fathers' willingness to support their children and mothers' ability to pursue child support were more important predictors of child support receipt in Korea than in the United States. Specific policy implications for both Korea and the United States are discussed.

Gender Equality in Child Support Policy: Fathers’ Rhetoric of “Fairness” in a Parliamentary Inquiry

Child support payments extend separated fathers’ male breadwinning role across households, likely fuelling fathers’ perceptions of ‘unfairness’. By examining fathers’ written submissions to an Australian inquiry, we examine fathers’ claims of unfairness, which were expressed in terms of gender inequality. Here, we show how fathers adopted a gender equality discourse that left intact the existing gender order. Through expectations for equal treatment, men claimed the child support system would produce equality of outcomes, namely eliminating the redistributive need for child support payments. In doing so, fathers’ qualified support for gender equality advantaged men as payers while further entrenching gender inequity.

Deservingness, Deadbeat Dads, and Responsible Fatherhood: Child Support Policy and Rhetorical Conceptualizations of Poverty, Welfare, and the Family

Since 1974, the U.S. federal government has passed more than 30 pieces of legislation related to child support. Such policies have significant implications for children and their custodial and noncustodial parents. I examine the evolution of these policies since the 1970s through cultural conceptualizations of poverty, welfare, and the family in presidential rhetoric. Using written and oral presidential statements from 1970 to 2011 as a symbolic representation of the nation's collective attention, I identify three themes—deservingness, deadbeat dads, and responsible fatherhood. These themes correspond with major shifts in child support policy through periods of welfare reform, the criminalization of the noncustodial father, and the strengthening of families, and helped to legitimize substantial shifts in child support policy over time.

Low-Income Nonresident Fatherhood: A Literature Review With Implications for Practice and Research

The emerging literature on fatherhood is contributing to the reframing of public perceptions of low-income nonresident fathers by focusing on father presence rather than absence. Insights into how and when fathers contribute to their children beyond financial support provides for a strengths-based perspective to engage fathers in services provided for their children. A review of this literature includes practice implications related to the need for: (a) father engagement training for agency staff, (b) father-friendly programs and services, (c) child support policy reform, and (d) more research on the issue of fatherhood in the 21st century.

Reforming Policy for Single-Parent Families to Reduce Child Poverty

We argue that child support, the central program specifically targeting single-parent families, should increase financial resources for children living with a single parent, with a secondary goal of holding parents responsible for supporting their children. Current child support policy is substantially successful for divorcing families in which the noncustodial parent has at least moderate formal earnings. However, the system does not work well for lower-income families, especially unmarried couples: far too few children regularly receive substantial support and the system is sometimes counterproductive to encouraging parental responsibility. We propose: a public guarantee of a minimum amount of support per child, assurances that no noncustodial parent will be charged beyond their current means, and a broadening of child support services.

Making parents pay: The unintended consequences of charging parents for foster care

Most families in the child protective services system also interact with the child support enforcement system. This study exploits a natural experiment in Wisconsin, created by the state's large regional variation in child support referral policy, to estimate a potentially important effect of child support enforcement on the duration of out-of-home foster care placement. The effect we examine is whether requiring parents to pay support to offset the costs of foster care delays children's reunification with a parent or other permanent placement. We find evidence of this unintended effect, which is important not only because longer foster care spells are expensive for taxpayers, but also because extended placements in foster care may have consequences for child well-being. Our results highlight the potential importance of cross-systems analysis and the potential consequences when the policies and fundamental objectives of public systems are inconsistently coordinated. We discuss the implications of our findings for child support and child protective services policy.

Indebted Relationships: Child Support Arrears and Nonresident Fathers' Involvement With Children

AbstractLow‐income, nonresident fathers owe a disproportionate amount of child support arrears, creating potential challenges for these fathers and their family relationships. This article uses mediation analysis to provide new evidence about how and why child support debt is related to paternal involvement using information from 1,017 nonresident fathers in the Fragile Families Study. Results show that child support arrears are associated with nonresident fathers having significantly less contact with children, being less engaged with them in daily activities, and providing less frequent in‐kind support 9 years after the birth. This negative association between child support debt and father involvement is most strongly and consistently mediated by the quality of the relationship between the biological parents. Although child support policies are designed to facilitate fathers' economic and emotional support, these results suggest that the accruement of child support debt may serve as an important barrier to father involvement.

Child support and mixed-status families an analysis using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study

A large body of literature documents the importance of child support for children’s wellbeing, though little is known about the child support behaviors of mixed-status families, a large and rapidly growing population in the United States. In this paper, we use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to investigate the impact of citizenship status on formal and informal child support transfers among a nationally representative sample of parents who have citizen children. Probit regression models and propensity score matching (PSM) estimators show that mixed-status families are significantly less likely to have child support orders and child support receipt compared to their citizen counterparts. We found that mothers’ knowledge of the child support system increases the probability of establishing paternity. However, cultural differences in knowledge of and perception about the U.S. child support system between mixed-status families and citizen families do not have an impact on the probability of getting a child support order, child support receipt, or in-kind child support. Rather, institutional factors such as collaborations between welfare agencies and child support enforcement agencies as well as state child support enforcement efforts have a significant impact on formal child support outcomes. The results are robust against different model specifications, measure constructions, and use of datasets. These findings have important policy implications for policy makers and researchers interested in reducing child poverty in complex family structures and underscore the need to revisit child support policies for mixed-status families.

Patterns of child support debt accumulation

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. We conclude with the implications of the results for child support policy and research.

Mothers' experiences of child support: qualitative research and opportunities for policy insight

Child support is one of the defining and under-studied elements of single mothering in contemporary Australia. However, the Australian Child Support Scheme is marked by high levels of debt and unreliable, partial and non-payment, which exacerbate mothers' financial insecurity. Most Australian child support research has focused on the amounts and outcomes of payments. Little is known about how and why mothers and fathers make the child support decisions they do. In this paper, we synthesise data from three interview studies with mothers who were due to receive child support to assess whether they experienced the system as intended. We compare the experience of child support policy ‘on the books’ with its experience by mothers ‘on the ground’. A qualitative approach to mothers' experiences of child support highlights the social meaning of that money and the importance of understanding its transfer and use as embedded in social relations.

Making Parents Pay: The Unintended Consequences of Charging Parents for Foster Care

Most families in the child protective services system also interact with the child support enforcement system. We exploit a natural experiment in Wisconsin, created by the large regional variation in child support referral policy, to estimate a potentially important effect of child support enforcement on the duration of out-of-home foster care placement. The effect we examine is whether requiring parents to pay support to offset the costs of foster care delays children's reunification with a parent or other permanent placement. We find evidence of this unintended effect, which is important not only because longer foster care spells are expensive for taxpayers, but also because extended placements in foster care may have consequences for child well-being. Our results highlight the potential importance of cross-systems analysis and the potential consequences when the policies and fundamental objectives of public systems are inconsistently coordinated. We discuss the implications of our findings for child support and child protective services policy.

The impact of child support on child health

The broad goals of child support policy are to keep children in single-parent families out of poverty and to make sure that their material needs are met. One potentially important, but relatively understudied, set of measures of child well-being are health outcomes. A fixed-effects analysis of data from the Child and Young Adult file of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth shows that, conditional upon receipt of some amount of child support, higher payment levels are associated with significantly greater odds of having private health insurance coverage and significantly lower odds of poor or declining health status. These effects persist even after controlling for other factors that are likely to be correlated with child support payments, including total family income and paternal visitation patterns.

Korean Divorced Mothers' Experiences with Child Support from Noncustodial Fathers

The purpose of this study was to explore Korean divorced mothers' experiences with child support. The data were collected from 17 Korean divorced mothers who were divorced between the years of 2004 and 2009 and were raising at least one minor child. Data were analyzed based on the inductive data analysis method. Most mothers negotiated to receive child support from noncustodial fathers without experiencing much conflict with the fathers at the time of the divorce, but only five mothers received child support at the time of the interviews. The mothers experienced difficulties in receiving child support from the fathers under the child support policy in Korea that treated child support as a personal issue and provided little systemic support for child support. Regarding required parenting agreements, most of the mothers acknowledged the need to have parenting agreements but they still wanted voluntary payment of the child support from the fathers. The results suggest that it is necessary to expand parenting education for divorced parents to encourage voluntary participation in parenting and to improve the child support policy by introducing child support guidelines and enhancing child support collection systems.

The disabled child support policy in consider of health and medical law system -Focusing on the Developmental Rehabilitation Program for Children with Disabilities-

The disabled child support policy in consider of health and medical law system -Focusing on the Developmental Rehabilitation Program for Children with Disabilities-