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This report explores the circumstances and opinions of 71 parents who were interviewed to help inform a project aimed at increasing the employment and earnings of disadvantaged fathers, and child support payments made by them. That project, the Parents' Fair Share Demonstration (PFS), tackles a social problem that is crucially linked to child poverty in the United States: the failure of noncustodial parents -- most of whom are fathers -- to contribute financially to their children's support. Through a unique combination of job training, personal support, and incentives, Parents' Fair Share will provide an opportunity for out-of-work fathers whose children receive public assistance to better fulfill their parental roles, especially as providers. The project will encourage them to establish legal paternity, if they have not done so, and to make regular payments through the formal child support system, in exchange for help in finding jobs and increasing their earning power.
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In every state and locality, noncustodial parents have the legal obligation to contribute to the financial support of their children. When they contribute too little, sporadically, or not at all, there is a "safety net" of government cash assistance, most often the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. Yet one out of five children in the United States is poor. Children living with single mothers are particularly vulnerable: 51 percent of all children in female-headed households, and more than two-thirds of children under age six living in such households, are poor.(1) The probability that, sometime before his eighteenth birthday, an American child born in 1980 would live in a household receiving welfare was almost one in three.(2)
In one sense, child poverty is a simple phenomenon. Usually, children are poor because their parents are poor -- most often because one or both parents work at low-wage or part-time jobs, or are unemployed or disabled. Some children are poor because their parents have separated or divorced or were never married and the noncustodial parent who is not living with them (usually the father) is not contributing financially to his family. With one divorce for every two marriages and an out-of-wedlock birth rate of 25 percent, it is not surprising that female-headed families with children make up the largest group living in poverty in the United States.(3)
In another sense, child poverty is extraordinarily complex. It raises a host of questions about society's expectations of parents, parents' motivations to work and to support their children, and the methods available to encourage and enforce expectations of parental responsibility. Child poverty is often enmeshed in unsuccessful relationships between men and women. Child poverty also reflects the failure of our educational institutions to equip some people for work, as well as obstacles in the job market for people who want to work. It mirrors and magnifies other social problems, including racial discrimination and gender bias; it points up the poor performance of many public agencies charged with establishing and enforcing legal child support obligations; and it reveals the difficulty of striking a balance between twin social goals providing adequate income for poor families who are incapable of supporting their children while still encouraging work and discouraging dependence on public assistance.
Creating and implementing simple, fair, and effective procedures to establish paternity and child support obligations has proven to be a challenge in many localities. Nationally, legal paternity is established for fewer than half of the children born to never-married parents in child support cases.(4) Ten million women age 15 or older have children who are theoretically eligible to receive financial support from an absent parent; yet child support awards have been made in only 58 percent of such cases.(5) Even more difficult is the task of collecting money from noncustodial parents. In 1989, only about half of the women who were owed child support received the full amounts due them. Payments are even less likely by noncustodial parents of welfare families, whose child support rights are signed over to the welfare agency, although they receive the first $50 paid by noncustodial parents as an incentive to cooperate in locating absent fathers.(6) Only about 16 percent of these families also received such child support incentive payments in 1990.
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The Family Support Act of 1988 mandated both a new employment and job training program for welfare recipients called the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) Program, and Ber state child support enforcement programs. The act also authorized a small-scale effort to help noncustodial parents who are unable to pay child support because they are unemployed. The Parents' Fair Share Demonstration (PFS) grew out of this provision of the law. While the core idea was to allow unemployed fathers in selected states access to the types of education and job training services offered through the JOBS program to AFDC recipients mostly mothers a program model was needed that would respond to the circumstances of the men targeted.
The reasons for nonpayment of child support are not well understood, and the responses of poor parents to new services and incentives could only be speculated upon when MDRC began developing Parents' Fair Share. Thus, in late 1990, a series of focus group interviews was begun with low-income fathers not living with their children, and with poor mothers, to learn more about how Parents' Fair Share should be designed. Key questions included: What do poor noncustodial parents say about their willingness to work and pay child support? Would they likely participate in job training programs on the condition that they cooperate with the formal child support system? What inducements were likely to be effective in gaining the cooperation of the custodial, as well as the noncustodial, parents of children receiving welfare?
The people whose voices are heard in this report were interviewed at different stages of Parents' Fair Share design and implementation. Early on, in the 1990 interviews, the main purpose was to learn more than the research literature provided about poor fathers and mothers living apart and to help shape the demonstration components. In the later (1991 and 1992) interviews, the objectives shifted slightly: The interviewers sought to confirm and extend the learning from the early interviews, especially to make sure that the demonstration approach made sense for a wide range of families with children receiving welfare, and to help set expectations for Parents' Fair Share.
These interviews were one of many sources of information that shaped the Parents' Fair Share model, which will be pilot-tested during 1992 and 1993. From family court judges, child support enforcement officials, researchers who study disadvantaged men and family formation and dissolution, administrators of programs providing employment services to disadvantaged men, advocates for women's and children's rights, and from the handful of people across the country who have designed and implemented employment programs for noncustodial parents, MDRC gathered impressions, opinions, and data to determine the optimum mix of opportunity and obligation in Parents' Fair Share and to specify the elements of the program. A model consisting of four components emerged: (1) occupational training and job search/placement services, emphasizing on-the-job (OJT) instead of classroom-based approaches; (2) enhanced child support enforcement using a variety of incentives to reward the efforts of noncustodial parents who participate and to increase the chances that uncooperative parents will be penalized; (3) peer support and parenting instruction for fathers to guide and reinforce positive parental behaviors; and (4) mediation services to help fathers and mothers work out disagreements that could interfere with regular payment of child support. (A fuller description of Parents' Fair Share is included at the end of this report.)
The stories of men and women who resemble those targeted by Parents' Fair Share form a clear and compelling point of departure for the demonstration. While there is a wide disparity of circumstances among the 71 individuals interviewed, what they have to say illustrates the potential for improving the existing child support system by offering new services and incentives. As the statistics cited above suggest, the public institutions responsible for establishing parental obligations and ensuring child support could be much more effective, and the interviews give hints of what would make the system fairer, more consistent, and more even-handed in the eyes of poor parents. The interviews also suggest the possible limits of the formal child support system. According to the fathers and mothers interviewed, that system is not the only barrier -- or even the most prominent barrier -- to financial contributions by noncustodial parents. They describe fundamental tensions between men and women that get in the way, beliefs about parental responsibility that are less absolute and more circumstantial than child support laws usually accommodate, and some acceptance of welfare as a substitute for parental support. There are also serious job handicaps, economic dislocation, and chaotic lives described here, as well as simple resistance to social controls.
Because of the way they were recruited for the focus groups, the people whose views are described in this report are not necessarily representative of parents who will make up the target group for Parents' Fair Share -- noncustodial parents of children receiving public assistance, and, for some services, the children's custodial parents. Furthermore, the authors can verify few of the details of the parents' circumstances, and they acknowledge possible exaggerations. Taken together, however, the opinions and experiences of these 71 parents provide a rich context for understanding how a program like Parents' Fair Share might affect their behavior. Without making excuses for the noncustodial parents who do not live up to their obligations for child support, this report attempts to get behind the alarming statistics and present the perspectives of the parents themselves. Ultimately, what parents in similar situations believe, and how they behave in response to the offer of employment services, will determine the success of Parents' Fair Share.
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This document has three main sections, each reporting on interviews conducted by different researchers in different cities. These are followed by a concluding discussion about the implications of the parents' attitudes and perceptions for Parents' Fair Share and for public policy in general. Descriptions of the interview locations, methods for identifying the parents, and other pertinent methodological information is provided at the beginning of each of the three main sections. The overall purpose of the interviews was similar: to learn what noncustodial parents -- who are most often fathers -- think about their roles and responsibilities, and about the public institutions that enforce child support obligations. One author, Frank Furstenberg, also set out to learn how custodial parents -- mothers, in his interview group -- think about the same issues and how they react to the opinions and behaviors of their children's fathers.
Because Parents' Fair Share is targeted to the noncustodial, unemployed parents of children receiving welfare, it was important to interview parents who would be similarly disadvantaged. Thus, most of the people whose words and views are reported here are poor; many of the fathers are unemployed or have been unemployed in the past, and many of the mothers are receiving welfare or have received it in the past. Also, almost all of the fathers are living apart from one or more of their children.
Child support is not just a problem of the poor, however. Middle-class parents end up in the child support system, too, and people with more than enough money to meet their child support obligations frequently fail to pay, sometimes causing their families to resort to public assistance. Parents' Fair Share programs will uncover such cases. To learn more about how the child support system works for fathers, regardless of their employment status and payment records, one of the groups interviewed for this report was drawn from a fathers' rights organization; employed, middle-class fathers predominated in this interview group.
There are major differences among child support programs in Baltimore, Maryland, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and New York City, where the interviews took place, including the extent to which the programs work with non-welfare populations, the probability that parents who do not pay will go to jail, and the laws governing local child support practices. These differences might be expected to shape the experiences and opinions of the parents who participated in the discussions summarized here.
However, across the interview locations, the fathers who talked about the public agencies that enforce child support obligations were consistently negative, although they did not oppose supporting their children in principle. But many of the fathers, and the mothers interviewed by Frank Furstenberg, were often mistaken about the child support procedures that affected them. The authors of the three main sections of the report do not go into much detail about how the child support system works in the interview locales. Nor do they always explain whether the beliefs the parents have about how the system works are justified. The perceptions parents have of the child support enforcement system -- formed by their direct experiences, by "word of mouth" reports, and by community-wide values -- may matter as much to their behavior as the legal foundations of the system or the actual operation of the public agencies charged with carrying out child support laws.
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1. C. M. Johnson et al., Child Poverty in America (Washington, D.C.: Children's Defense Fund, 1991). [Back To Text]
2. D. P. Moynihan, "Social Justice in the Next Century," America 165 (September 14, 1991). [Back To Text]
3. National Center for Health Statistics, Monthly Vital Statistics Report 40, no. 12 (1992); Johnson et al., Child Poverty; and Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives, 1991 Green Book: Overview of Entitlement Programs, Background Material and Data on Programs Within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), p. 1146, Table 11. [Back To Text]
4. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Child Support Enforcement, Child Support Enforcement: Fifteenth Annual Report to Congress, For the Period Ending September 30, 1990 (Washington, D.C.: National Child Support Enforcement Reference Center, n.d.), pp. 15-16. [Back To Text]
5. G. H. Lester, Child Support and Alimony: 1989, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, Series P-60, no. 173 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1991). [Back To Text]
6. Committee on Ways and Means, 1991 Green Book. [Back To Text]
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Last updated: 03/26/01