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More than 22 million or 1 in 4 children in the United States are currently served by the child support program. This program, the third largest used to address childhood poverty, regulates non-custodial parents’ financial support of their children through federal, state, and municipal legislation and policies. The collateral consequences, particularly those related to economic stability and criminal justice involvement, associated with child support system participation have been widely studied. However, many of the interpersonal interactions between those who have cases in the system and those who work in the system have been largely ignored. In this article, I use courtroom observations, in-depth interviews, and cultural artifacts to explore the practices of stigmatization and shaming in this important legal and bureaucratic process. I explore stigma and shame in three thematic areas: (1) shame in social interactions, (2) shame as a tool of social control, and (3) the social consequences of shame. I ultimately suggest that stigma and shame in the child support system, resembling that in the welfare and criminal justice systems, reinforces cognitive boundaries between parents perceived as “responsible” and those perceived as “deadbeats.”

Written by one of the UK's leading scholars of welfare law, this book analyses the current child support legislation in its broader historical and social context, synthesising both doctrinal and socio-legal approaches to legal research and scholarship. The book draws on the historical and legal literature on the Poor Law and the development of both the public and private law obligation of child maintenance.

This article is based on face-to-face interviews with 20 randomly selected fathers of black and white children receiving temporary assistance for needy families benefits, followed, when possible, by an interview with the mother of one of the father’s children in Dane County, Wisconsin. The primary purpose of this research was to explore the sample’s level of knowledge about child support enforcement program policy. The informants shared information on their knowledge of child support enforcement program policy and procedures, but also their access or lack of access to social networks for employment to pay their child support order, and experiences with various imposed sanctions for non-payment of their child support order. The data provided an opportunity to conduct comparisons across and within races on their experiences with the child support enforcement program. Results from an analysis of the qualitative data provided an insight into their “lived” experiences with law enforcement by race when their child support was in arrears. In addition, quantitative data obtained from the Wisconsin kids information data system administrative records highlighted the stark racial differences in fathers’ annual (UI) earnings and debt owed in child support to the state and the mother of their child (ren). Further analysis highlights the limited social networks for referrals to employment among black noncustodial fathers and the accumulated debt of child support for black men, which hampers their ability to maintain a minimal level of economic security.

This paper is an assessment of the impact of child support enforcement and welfare policies on nonmarital teenage childbearing and motherhood. We derive four hypotheses about the effects of policies on nonmarital teenage childbearing and motherhood. We propose that teenage motherhood and school enrollment are joint decisions for teenage girls. Based on individual trajectories during ages 12-19, our analysis uses an event history model for nonmarital teenage childbearing and a dynamic model of motherhood that is jointly determined with school enrollment. We find some evidence that child support policies indirectly reduce teen motherhood by increasing the probability of school enrollment, which, in turn, reduces the probability of teen motherhood. This finding suggests that welfare offices may wish to place greater weight on outreach programs that inform more teenagers of the existence of strong child support enforcement measures. Such programs might reduce nonmarital teen motherhood further and thus reduce the need for welfare support and child support enforcement in the long run.

This paper examines the relationships between several child support policies, paternity establishment, and child support award rates among never-married women. We use several state policies and practices in place throughout the 1980s to examine their effectiveness at increasing paternity establishment rates and at increasing the proportion of unmarried women who have child support awards. We also examine the direct relationship between paternity establishment rates and child support award rates. We estimate these relationships using a variety of specifications, using cross-state variation in child support enforcement to identify the effects of policies. To date, child support remains largely the province of state family law, and, although policies have changed dramatically in response to two decades of federal mandates, state laws and practices still vary.

This chapter, which examines child support policies, especially the activities of the Child Support Enforcement (CSE) Program, and how they interact with transfer policies and affect the low-income population, is organized as follows. Section 9.2 reviews the history of the CSE program, its rules, and objectives. Section 9.3 considers the economic rationale for government's role in child support. Section 9.4 describes trends in child support awards and payments. Section 9.5 discusses the importance of child support to low-income families. Section 9.6 examines the capacity of noncustodial parents to pay child support. Section 9.7 discusses the trends in costs and effectiveness of the child support program. Section 9.8 reviews the financing of this program. Section 9.9 examines the effects of child support incentives on behavior. Section 9.10 discusses remaining equity issues within child support. Section 9.11 considers several reform proposals. The final section draws conclusions about directions for the future of child support policies.

This paper provides an overview of the nature and key priorities of family support services operating in OECD countries to inform on the factors that contribute to their quality and delivery effectiveness. The evidence collated in this paper draws from the responses to Questionnaires answered by delegates to the OECD Working Party on Social Policy and by around 170 family service providers from OECD countries. The report discusses policy options to help countries develop and sustain the effective delivery of family support services throughout childhood, improve their quality, and to make better use of digital tools to enhance service delivery.

This article discusses the diversity of family policy models in 28 OECD countries in terms of the balance between their different objectives and the mix of instruments adopted to implement the policies. Cross-country policy differences are investigated by applying a principal component analysis to comprehensive country-level data from the OECD Family Database covering variables such as parental leave conditions, childcare service provision, and financial support to families. The results find persistent differences in the family policy patterns embedded in different contexts of work-family \"outcomes.\" Country classifications of family policy packages only partially corroborate categorizations in earlier studies, owing to considerable within-group heterogeneity and the presence of group outliers. The Nordic countries outdistance the others with comprehensive support to working parents with very young children. Anglo-Saxon countries provide much less support for working parents with very young children, and financial support is targeted on low-income and large families and focuses on preschool and early elementary education. Continental and Eastern European countries form a more heterogeneous group, while the support received by families in Southern Europe and in Asian countries is much lower in all its dimensions.

Parents can be essential change-agents in their children’s lives. To support parents in their parenting role, a range of programs have been developed and evaluated. In this paper, we provide an overview of the evidence for the effectiveness of parenting interventions for parents and children across a range of outcomes, including child and adolescent mental and physical health, child and adolescent competencies and academic outcomes, parental skills and competencies, parental wellbeing and mental health, and prevention of child maltreatment and family violence. Although there is extensive research showing the effectiveness of evidence-based parenting programs, these are not yet widely available at a population level and many parents are unable to access support. We outline how to achieve increased reach of evidence-based parenting supports, highlighting the policy imperative to adequately support the use of these supports as a way to address high priority mental health, physical health, and social problems.

How are children's lives altered when a parent goes off to war? What aspects of combat deployment are most likely to put children at risk for psychological and other problems, and what resources for resilience can they tap to overcome such hardships and thrive? To answer these questions, Patricia Lester and Lieutenant Colonel Eric Flake first examine the deployment cycle, a multistage process that begins with a period of anxious preparation after a family receives notice that a parent will be sent into combat. Perhaps surprisingly, for many families, they write, the most stressful part of the deployment cycle is not the long months of separation that follow but the postdeployment period, when service members, having come home from war, must be reintegrated into families whose internal rhythms have changed and where children have taken on new roles. Lester and Flake then walk us through a range of theoretical perspectives that help us understand the interconnected environments in which military children live their lives, from the dynamics of the family system itself to the external contexts of the communities where they live and the military culture that helps form their identity. The authors conclude that policy makers can help military-connected children and their families cope with deployment by, among other things, strengthening community support services and adopting public health education measures that are designed to reduce the stigma of seeking treatment for psychological distress. They warn, however, that much recent research on military children's response to deployment is flawed in various ways, and they call for better-designed, longer-term studies as well as more rigorous evaluation of existing and future support programs.