“But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.”
1 Timothy 5:8
Child support enforcement (CSE) involves the establishment of paternity and the securing of child support payments from noncustodial parents. For many custodial parents, child support payments are made to the state to offset the cost of Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) and other welfare programs. Child support enforcement has failed in that the fraction of custodial parents who receive child support awards has fallen, and among those with awards, even fewer receive the full amount of mandated payments. These problems are most pronounced among custodial parents in vulnerable communities. Instead of increasing support for custodial parents, efforts to enforce child support have resulted in chaos and dysfunction. The system alienates fathers from their children, reduces labor force participation, and increases tension between police and the communities they serve.
First, we detail the failures of child support enforcement. The following section puts the breakdown of the American family and child support into historical context. There following, the paper examines the unintended consequences of child support enforcement. We close by looking at critical decisions resulting in our current system of social insurance, including child support enforcement.
The Failure of Child Support Enforcement
The historical roots of the current child support enforcement system can be traced to the Social Security Act of 1935 (42 U.S.C. §§ 301-Suppl. 4 1934) as well as concomitant social and economic conditions of that and subsequent periods. Within the Social Security Act, provisions of the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program (later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC) were designed to meet the economic needs of children in single-parent households.
Initially, the recipients of ADC were predominately white women. This orientation reflected that ADC was primarily an extension of state-operated mothers’ pension programs, of which white widows had been the primary beneficiaries (Jones 1985). Individual states determined eligibility for these payments, and black women were often ineligible or simply barred from full participation (Carten 2021). By the early 1970s, however, the AFDC caseload had changed from mostly widows to custodial parents who were separated, divorced, or never married. During the 1970s and subsequently, AFDC was modified and then succeeded by programs designed to constrain the cost of welfare to such households.
In 1975, the Child Support Enforcement and Paternity Establishment program (42 U.S. Code Part D—Child Support and Establishment of Paternity, § 651-§ 696b) was developed to reduce welfare expenditures by obtaining support from noncustodial parents, establishing paternity for children born outside marriage, establishing support orders, and collecting child support payments on behalf of custodial parents.
In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (Pub. L. 104–193. 110 Stat. 2105, 1996). TANF involves direct payments to states and requires states, among other things, to (1) increase the identification of noncustodial parents and (2) implement more rigorous and intrusive enforcement methods. For example, when custodial parents—in most cases, mothers—apply for government assistance, they assign to the state their right to receive direct support payments from the noncustodial parent. Funds sought or received from the noncustodial parent become collectible directly by the state to reimburse public assistance; and custodial parents must cooperate with states in establishing paternity and in locating the other parent.
Figure 1 tracks the number of CSE cases and paternity determinations from inception to the present based on Solomon-Fears (2016) and U.S. Child Support Enforcement Agency annual reports. The case load peaked at about 20 million during the early 1990s and has since fallen to under 15 million. Paternity determinations reached a peak of about 1.5 million in the late 1990s, and then reached a second, higher peak of about 1.75 million late in the first decade of the twenty-first century and have since fallen back under 1.5 million. These figures make it appear that CSE has been successful. But vigorous enforcement and success are not necessarily the same thing.
Figure 2 tracks child support payments received by custodial parents based on the Biennial Child Support Supplement to the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Bureau of the Census and its predecessors. The figure shows that there was little change in support payments received by custodial parents during the build-up of case load and of paternity determinations in the early years of CSE. From 1978 to 1991, the percentage of custodial parents receiving support payments, either full or partial, rose from just below
