Unintended Consequences: A Critical Review of Child Support Enforcement.

• Author: Thies, Clifford F.

"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. [section][section] 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, [section] 651-[section] 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 to just above 40 percent. During the early 1990s, when caseload was peaking, the percentage of custodial parents receiving support payments fell back to the mid-30th percentile. In recent years, this percentage has fallen to the low 30s. In spite of the deterioration of child support payments since the ramp up of CSE, advocates of CSE claim credit for the child support payments that are being made. The claim ignores that a higher percentage of custodial parents received payments prior to CSE.

Figure 2 reveals that the primary factor for the decrease in child support payments was the increasing percentage of custodial parents lacking an award. This increasing lack of awards can, in turn, be connected to the lack of incentive to mothers and putative fathers to establish paternity (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1999, 6). Prior to the availability of DNA testing in the late 1990s, paternity was established upon the admission of putative fathers. That is, blood tests could only disprove paternity. But with DNA testing, paternity is proven with a high degree of confidence. Still, the cooperation of the putative father is required to administer the DNA test. In many cases, there would be a significant monetary loss to him and little or no monetary gain to the mother (because the support payments mainly or exclusively offset the cost of the support she is receiving from the government).

The overall percentage of custodial parents receiving support payments is small, but the percentage is even smaller for certain groups. Table 1 looks at a recent survey (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2018). Only 24 percent of custodial parents who are African American, and only 28 percent of those who are Hispanic, receive support payments. Perhaps more significantly, large majorities of black and Hispanic custodial parents do not even have support awards.

With regard to the amount of support awarded and received, custodial parents with awards received on average $3,431 per child in 2017, of $5,519 awarded, or 62.2 percent (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2018, 9-10). This shortfall might make it appear that child support enforcement could be effective in lifting children out of poverty. However, as the old saying goes, you can't get blood from a turnip. Many noncustodial parents have little means to support their children. Only one hundred thousand of the 1.2 million households of custodial parents with awards that are below the poverty line could be lifted out of poverty had they received the full amount of their award.

As it has been established that CSE failed to induce support from noncustodial parents, this paper now backtracks to the 1930s to discuss the disintegration of the American family, especially the African American family.

The American Family since the 1930s

Returning to the 1930s, the greater fragility of the family within the black community was recognized in real time. Gunnar Myrdal, in his study of the black community, described the African American as an "exaggerated American" (1944, 712). The expression was meant to reflect that the African American was quintessentially American in terms of values and social institutions, yet excluded from mainstream American life by reason of legally enforced segregation and race-based discrimination. Following the work of E. Franklin Frazier (1939), Myrdal measured the fragility of the family within the black community by the ratio of live births to unmarried women per 1,000 live births, as compared to this ratio in the white community. (1)

Figure 3 tracks family structure by race and ethnicity using the percentage of children in two-parent households based on Steven Ruggles (1994) and the Current Population Survey. (2)

The figure shows that, prior to World War II, a smaller percentage of non-white children were raised in two-parent households than white children. According to Ruggles (1994, 142), about half of this race difference was due to lower life expectancy for nonwhites. The remaining race difference was probably due to other socioeconomic factors. (3) Then, following World War II, the percentages of children raised in two-parent households declined precipitously, the percentage pertaining to African Americans even more so. Since the early 2000s, there has been something of a recovery. From time to time, the dramatic decrease in the percentage of children raised in two-parent households has gained public attention (e.g., Moynihan 1965; Murray 1984; Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz 1996).

It is difficult to isolate the cause or causes of the post-World War II breakdown of the American family, because of the confluence of multiple factors. Certainly, the birth control pill and penicillin challenged traditional sexual morality, which reserved sexual relations and childbearing to marriage. The postponement of marriage was involved. Women's rights, the Civil Rights movement, and antiwar...