What parent doesn’t want to help his or her child? Most people would wonder why the question even needs to be asked. But while child neglect and child poverty are issues that the social safety net and public assistance rightfully focus on addressing, legislative efforts to require delinquent or absent parents to take financial responsibility prove a handy tool for reducing the problem of childhood poverty.
Child Support Enforcement (CSE) was first passed into federal law in 1974. It was set up to make parents become financially responsible for their children. At the time, 75 percent of welfare caseloads involved an absent parent.
CSE became a part of the social services network in order to take pressure off government services and return the job of parenting to where it belonged — the parent. Yet nonpayment of child support remains a huge problem today, even after the 1996 welfare reform law strongly enhanced enforcement mechanisms.
Child Support Enforcement is an issue that crosses partisan lines. Separation and divorce are an unfortunate circumstance of modern life, and child support delinquencies are not confined to one particular income level or political belief. At the same time, CSE was a major factor in reducing poverty among children after the 1996 welfare reform law was signed.
Believe it or not, one quarter of the welfare reform law of 1996 was dedicated to CSE. Its impact was notable. Child support agreements among poor parents increased by 8 percentage points from 1993-2003, meaning more children were assured that the parent not living with them helped pay for their upbringing. Enforcing child support payments resulted in a 74 percent increase in payment collections over 10 years.
So what happened? In the second decade since the law was passed, the percentage of custodial parents with a payment agreement dropped by nearly 14 points.
What accounts for the loss of momentum? Robert Doar, the former commissioner of New York City’s Health and Human Services, explains.
What accounts for this loss of momentum is a legitimate, although exaggerated, concern about being too tough on poor noncustodial parents, the parent who is not living with the child. A false wisdom has emerged in the policy community—from academics to the media—that the child support system forces noncustodial dads to, as the headline of a 2015 New York Times story put it, “Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.” Some influential commentators even see the system as fundamentally unjust by imposing on poor men burdens that are viewed as the government’s responsibility. …
Certainly, some poor noncustodial parents are struggling and need help to live up to their obligations. But most noncustodial parents, poor and nonpoor alike, are capable of working and could contribute something—even a regular payment of $25 per month has value. Analysts who are critical of the program seem to forget that the parent raising the child full time is often poor too. In 2013, for poor custodial parents who received child support payments, the noncustodial parent’s payments represented 49 percent of their income. Allowing parents to completely walk away from their financial responsibility to their children should not be an option.
According to Doar, if the share of poor custodial parents with agreements had held steady at the percentage that it was in 2003 when the welfare reform law was still being closely enforced, then 500,000 more poor custodial parents would have had orders to receive support in 2013!
“Surely a substantial fraction of these parents would have received enough in payments for them and their children to be lifted above the poverty line,” he wrote in the introduction to a recent volume he edited on the topic.
What Reasons Are There For Parents to Refuse to Pay Child Support?
A lot of times, the parent responsible for child support payments is cut off from the child. Other times, resentment of one parent toward the other leads to a child being caught in the middle. Still other times, suspicion that the money is being misused by the custodial parent is made as an excuse by noncustodial parents to withhold payments.
But sometimes, the paying parent claims he just can’t afford it. And while that claim may have been doubted or disproven, it sadly is becoming a more frequent excuse due to an unfortunate shift in American culture and economy — notably the increasing struggle of men in the labor market. More from Doar:
Reliable data on noncustodial parents are hard to come by because the Census Bureau’s major surveys do not ask whether a man living alone is also a nonresident father. But a survey from 1997 conducted by the Urban Institute found that only 43 percent of noninstitutionalized, nonresident fathers who were poor worked at all—and this was during the late 1990s economic boom. Another study from the Urban Institute used administrative data from nine states in 2003 and 2004 and found that 25 percent of all obligors had no reported income. …
I suspect, given the evidence on young, low-skilled men generally, that these rates must look even worse today. In 2000, among African American men age 16–24 without a high school diploma and not in school, the employment rate was 40.8 percent, and for similarly positioned whites, it was 72.3 percent. By 2007 (like 2000, a year at the peak of the business cycle), the rates had fallen dramatically to 28.7 and 55.0 percent, respectively.
Seven million men age 25 to 54 are not working or even looking for work, according to recent data. Many of them have children despite having never married. These men are disproportionately less educated, and seen by woman as less “marriageable.” Yet marriage is a reliable indicator of higher paying jobs.
With the increasing struggle of men in the labor market, sympathy has shifted. But there is something of a chicken-and-egg argument to all this. Where once women claimed they didn’t need men to raise their children, they still demanded that fathers (a majority of noncustodial parents) help out. Did women tell men to get lost because they were dead weight? Or did men become deadbeats because their paternal role was rejected?
Data show that 70 percent of arrears are owed by noncustodial parents who have no documented income or very little earnings (less than $10,000 a year). And 25 percent of poor custodial parents with a support agreement aren’t receiving payments. So whatever the relationship between parents, the question is now whether it is even possible to get blood from a stone?
Much can be done to fix the mish-mash of regulations and changes that have occurred over the last 40 years. For instance, determining what is a proper measure of a noncustodial parent’s income would go a long way to changing the way male parents look at work. Why is this? Because evaluating a parent’s ability to pay support based on an over-the-table paycheck disincentivizes men from going to work.
The reforms to the program in 1996 focused on tracking down and holding accountable “deadbeat” dads, but it did little to acknowledge or address those who really are dead broke. This is a difficult balance to strike—I know from my experience working in New York that many fathers who appear to have few assets and no earnings are working off-the-books or involved in illicit activities, but they are reluctant to make that known because they either do not want to pay or do not want the government to know of their off-the-books activities.
Another issue is the requirement to declare the other parent’s ability to pay support before qualifying for assistance. The purpose of the requirement is to ensure custodial parents look to the other parent to contribute before going to the government for help. This is the case with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the cash welfare program.
But TANF is on the decline while Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, child care, and housing assistance programs are on the rise. And guess what? Those programs don’t require opening a child support case as a condition of receiving aid.
But the issue, Doar explains once more, isn’t necessarily a matter of what you have to reveal, but whether the revelation leads to some kind of change.
Policy should not have to choose between helping single mothers or low-income men. CSE is a rare government program (outside the criminal justice system) that interacts often with disconnected, low-skilled men, but it does not do enough to help them. Order amounts should be responsive to the noncustodial parent’s ability to pay and his changing economic circumstances, and significant improvements have been made on this front. But a singular focus on reducing order amounts and forgiving arrears distracts from the main challenge these men face: not enough of them are working. Instead of reducing what we expect of these men, we should help them better meet their obligations to their families and society.
Lastly, Doar notes that if federal or state assistance is dependent on parents working, then expand the programs that incentivize work.
While momentum has been building in Washington for an expansion of the earned income tax credit (EITC) for all childless adults, this policy is not well-targeted. A better solution is to expand the EITC for noncustodial parents who work and pay current child support. As commissioner in New York State, I created and implemented such a program, and an Urban Institute analysis found that it increased the share of parents who paid their support in full.
Why Is the Child Support Enforcement Program Important?
Historically, CSE has worked. Even as late as 2015, CSE resulted in $5.26 in payments for ever dollar spent on enforcement. Doar explains that enforcement works for several reasons:
- The program sends a clear message to all potential parents: if you play a role in bringing a child into the world, you have a responsibility to help support him or her.
- Strong child support enforcement not only communicates that essential American value, it changes the incentives around fathering children outside of marriage by making it impossible to abandon the responsibilities of parenthood.
- When child support obligations force an absent parent to be reminded of his financial responsibilities, he is also more likely to take up his other parental duties and be more involved in the child’s life. Unsurprisingly then, receiving child support is also linked to better outcomes for the children involved.
- Studies have found that formal child support payments are associated with fewer behavioral problems, better academic performance, and increased self-esteem.
- While it may seem counterintuitive, the CSE program offers one of policy’s best opportunities to address the crisis of prime-age male nonwork in America.
CSE is a needed and effective program. It currently lifts more than one million families above the government’s official poverty line, reduces single parenthood, and improves child outcomes, all by enforcing and facilitating personal responsibility at very low cost to taxpayers.
