Contact Name
Barbara Dietsch
562-985-9488

Contact Email
bdietsc@WestEd.org

Elaine Sorensen, Ph.D.
Income & Benefits Policy Center
The Urban Institute

When it comes to the repercussions of teen sex, female adolescents shoulder a majority of the responsibility. If they become pregnant, they are often faced with the possibility of supporting children with little help from the father of their children. Many end up on welfare. It is easy to blame noncustodial dads for the lack of financial support they provide. But to do so is to overlook important facts: not only do many of these young fathers have low incomes which make child support payments difficult or impossible, but the system set up to encourage their contributions-child support enforcement-may in fact be discouraging them from formal financial involvement in their children's lives.

In 1990, there were 9.5 million noncustodial fathers with 18 million children potentially eligible for child support. These fathers tend to be young, disproportionately African-American, with limited education. Although 90 percent of these fathers worked or looked for work in 1990, only 18 percent of them worked full-time, year-round that year. Their annual personal income averaged only $8,956 (expressed in 1998 dollars). Despite their low incomes, few of these fathers received any sort of public assistance in 1990, and even fewer received means-tested employment-related services.

Child support policies do not provide noncustodial parents with much incentive to surrender a portion of their incomes, especially if their children are on welfare. For a family that is on welfare, most (if not all) of a child support payment goes to the government to offset the cost of providing the welfare. In 1996, Congress rescinded the federal mandate that obligated states to give at least $50 of the child support payment to the family. Today, states have the option to provide some, none, or all of the payment to the family. However, any amount provided to the family is at the state's expense. Most states have opted to discontinue any sort of pass through to the family.

Having custodial parents reimburse the state for welfare payments may sound reasonable: Why shouldn't the father help defer the cost of providing for his family? Yet, this approach discourages noncustodial parents from making support payments from which their children will receive little direct benefit. Given the choice between supporting the system or their own kids, many fathers choose their kids, making payments under the table to the mothers of their children. Furthermore, the fact that fathers are expected to pay at least part of the cost of welfare, while poor custodial mothers aren't, may strike many dads as inequitable. Even those who feel strongly obligated to their children may be reluctant to make payments, given this imbalance.

Child support policies are saddled with other disincentives. The amount a father is expected to pay often bears little relation to the father's economic situation. When a father does not appear in court to establish his earnings capacity, many states allow courts to assume, at a minimum, that the father can work a full-time minimum-wage job and impute his income at this rate. In 1998, a full-time minimum wage job would have paid $10,714 a year. Low-income noncustodial fathers would have earned $8,956 that year if their earnings had kept pace with inflation between 1990 and 1998, or 16 percent less than a full-time year-round minimum wage job. Default orders are necessary because some dads deliberately miss their court date, but orders that overstate a father's ability to pay unduly penalize them.

In addition, payments tend to be regressive, requiring low-income fathers to pay a larger share of their income toward child support than do higher-income fathers. The practice of issuing default and retroactive orders further contributes to the large arrearages that low-income noncustodial fathers often face. For example, many states set child support awards for unmarried parents back to the date of the birth of the child even if no action was taken to establish paternity until much later. If the father does not provide information regarding his earnings capacity, courts will impute an income for him back to the date of the child's birth and set the child support award accordingly. Courts rarely, if ever, consider whether the father lived with the child during this period or informally contributed to the child's well-being, when setting the retroactive award. Such huge debt can overwhelm fathers who are already struggling to make ends meet.

Compliance with child support enforcement can be improved by addressing these disincentives. For example, fathers would be more likely to make support payments to children on welfare if the money went directly to the families instead of to the government. By allowing families to keep all of their payments, child support agencies can substantially increase the amount of child support dollars paid to children. In addition, compliance will also improve if a better effort is made to set realistic child support orders, even for those who fail to show up in court, and if back support owed to the government is forgiven or reduced.

Finally, it is important that child support agencies encourage fathers to spend time with their children. Research shows that noncustodial parents are more likely to pay child support if they can spend time with their children. While the federal government has been reluctant to regulate visitation and access, Congress recently authorized $10 million in access and visitation grants to help states facilitate contact between noncustodial parents and their children. Changes that treat noncustodial fathers more fairly, and allow them to be part of their children's lives, promise to go a long way toward building stronger families.