How America's Child Support System Failed To Keep Up With The Times : NPR

Oncefa2 · 2021-03-02T17:16:18+00:00

It seems like a lot of people agree that the child support system is broken, even if it is well intentioned.

Well this article explains how the modern child support system in the US was originally created back in the 1970s, and how it no longer works in the modern world.

At the time, most children were born inside of marriage. And jobs were plentiful and paid enough for men to work and women to stay home.

Child support was designed to help divorced mothers, not their children (as is often claimed), because they couldn't support themselves without a husband and relied on welfare and charity. They also usually ended up with the children. So the system was designed to mimick a single income household where a father could earn enough money on his own for two people, and could therefore help pay for his ex to stay home and take care of the children.

Now that most families are dual income and many children are born out of wedlock, this paradigm doesn't really work anymore. Most non-working moms aren't housewives anymore. They are actually single and living off welfare and child support as a preemptive lifestyle choice that they made for themselves, not as part of a mutually beneficial arrangement between a consenting husband and his wife. That is no longer what's "normal" for people who are raising children together, so the argument is that our welfare and child support laws need to be reformed to reflect this reality.

The main issue caused by the current system is that men often cannot earn enough money for themselves, the mother, and their children. Courts however still operate under that assumption because that is what the law expects out of them. The result is crippling debt, abject poverty, and often incarceration. A man's inability to pay is itself seen as a crime, not as evidence that too much is being expected out of him.

The article goes on to say that we need to normalize 50-50 custody arrangements as a legal standard since fathers are equally as involved in their children's lives, and mothers are now working to help pay the bills.

Basically, there's no reason for our laws and social standards around parenting to be different after a couple separates than when they were together. The strong and independent woman of the modern world should be expected to work and "not need no man" to support her regardless if she's in a relationship or not. And the man ought to have just as much access to his kids as he did before the separation.

PrincessofPatriarchy · 2021-03-02T21:24:18+00:00

I've been called a number of horrible things for advocating for paper abortions. I support paper abortions along with expansion to WIC programs and access to affordable daycare in impoverished areas. But apparently that makes me a misogynist. Someone recently told me they hope my (non existent) children suffer because I advocated this view.

I think that child-support is an outdated model and failure to pay is all too common. This system isn't helping women or their children, it's just aimed at punishing men and foisting responsibility on absent parents who we wish to punish for a perceived moral failure.

I think absent parents are shitty people but I don't think 18 years of mandated child support payments makes them any better, nor does it help the children very often because so many of them can't or won't pay. If a parent decides they want to walk away from their child and give up all rights then let them do so and let them live with themselves, we cannot force them to care even if we wanted to (this judgment applies to absentee parents of any gender, not to birth parents who arrange an adoption or women who seek abortions. Those cases are not abandonment).

Those parents who remain involved and don't pay often do so because they can't afford to pay, not because they don't care about their children. Putting involved dads in jail is not what is best for the children either so this argument that it's about what is best for the children seems empty to me.

turbulance4 · 2021-03-02T22:14:55+00:00

November 19, 2015

You'd think we could have changed this by now. Or at least have most of the left on board given it was OK for NPR 7 years ago.

In 1975, this system would try to ensure that after a divorce, we would try to replicate what the household looked like prior to the divorce

That doesn't make sense, not even in 1975 terms. On the one hand, the point of divorce is to change, saying "You can change, but it has to be exactly like it was before you changed" is just crazy talk. On the other, even if a man was breadwinner enough to support his wife and child in his home, that doesn't mean he also completely capable of supporting to households.

that say, let's set what we call right-sized orders, that we actually take into account what he actually has the ability to pay when we establish these child support orders

Why are we making the presumption that child support must exist in any form? Why not just assume 50/50 with no support, and only consider support if the family can't or won't do 50/50? (I see they kind of hit on that later in the article)

For our low-income guys who can't afford anything, the moms are having to work, why don't they provide the child care? We're not ready to go that way with our families, but our families have changed so much, we need a system that starts to keep up with them some way.

Ohh, they got so close to recognizing that the gender of the parent shouldn't matter, but didn't quite get there. Still pretty nice for how old the article is.

Sewblon · 2021-03-03T00:10:31+00:00

Ultimately, then, what's the purpose of child support system?

The states' incentives really are to set amounts that can be collected on that make it look like they are reaching collection goals. But the performance measures at the federal level are based on the proportion that you collect based on the proportion that's established.

They didn't answer the question at all.

But it is interesting to know that child-support was created to replicate the nuclear family, and now, many men just don't have the money for that, because of declining wages for non-college workers.

One thing we could do is get rid of all the work-requirements for welfare, and just accept that sometimes, a woman raising her kids without financial contribution from the father full-time is the best we can do, and that the state is going to have to pay for that. But then you have to answer the question of: "Why should all the people with jobs and no kids need to pay for the kids of people with no jobs?" The obvious answer is that "poverty is bad. Poverty for Children is even worse, because it hurts the child's economic potential, and therefore their future tax-paying potential. So really, its an investment in future tax payers, not a hand out." But, we know that such things, called fiscal externalities don't actually imply any economic inefficiencies. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/109114219902700101?journalCode=pfrb

So that argument doesn't hold water.

Title	How America's Child Support System Failed To Keep Up With The Times : NPR
Author	Oncefa2
Upvotes	72
Comments	8
Date	March 2, 2021 5:11 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/lw746c/how_americas_child_support_system_failed_to_keep/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/how-americas-child-support-system-failed-to-keep.1061839 https://theredarchive.com/post/1061839

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