It's Time to Rethink Child Support

Are parents who are unable to pay their child support orders deserving of the punishment and vilification that often accompanies their nonpayment? The answer is probably much more complicated than many believe. In an effort to shed light on some of the ways in which child support enforcement criminalizes poverty and to redress some of the injustices associated with punitive and vilifying methods of collecting child support, Equal Justice Under Law filed a lawsuit last March challenging the Missouri Family Support Division’s practice of suspending driver’s licenses of residents who owe more than $2,500 in child support debt or are over three months behind on payments. As Equal Justice Under Law points out in this lawsuit, suspensions of driver’s licenses are incredibly counterproductive as a means of coercing indigent parents to pay: not only do suspensions not make any changes to parents’ financial, employment, or education status, but they also prevent parents’ ability to obtain further education and employment, or to visit their children.

Unfortunately for the Plaintiffs in this lawsuit and similarly situated noncustodial indigent parents across the country, the suspensions of driver’s licenses are only the first means by which state agencies are given authority to enforce and collect child support from parents living in poverty. Arrests and incarcerations based solely on failure to pay court-ordered child support are common practice in at least 36 states, and as many as 50,000 people are serving jail sentences at any given time across the country for civil contempt based on nonpayment of child support. And despite popular mythologies about “deadbeat dads” and absentee parents who willfully neglect their child support obligations, the reality is that this widespread criminalization of parents based on failure to pay child support happens primarily to parents in poverty who, despite their best efforts and desires to provide for their families, simply lack the means to do so. In California, for instance, 80 percent of parents who owe child support debt make less than $20,000 annually, and 60 percent make less than $10,000 annually.

Nationwide, noncustodial parents with incomes below the federal poverty line have child support payments that make up 69 percent of their incomes. For those earning less than $10,000 annually, child support payments can constitute up to 83 percent of their earnings. Noncustodial parents with reported incomes of $500 or less monthly have child support obligations averaging more than 100 percent of their earnings. Many of these parents are without any recourse: though they are statutorily allowed to seek modification based on a “substantial change in circumstances,” states do not consider chronic poverty, structural racism, and systemic underemployment to be relevant changes in circumstances, and incarceration has historically been considered voluntary unemployment.  On the flipside, 93 percent of parents with incomes over $10,000 annually pay their child support orders, illustrating the fact that those who can afford to comply are indeed complying.

In many states, family court judges may impute income for noncustodial parents to inform their support orders, but these imputations fail to recognize that many of these parents are incarcerated, lack a high school degree, have only part-time work, or are chronically unemployed. The fact that these parents often do not have access to counsel or may not even be present in court during their support hearings exacerbates these failings. And punitive enforcement mechanisms, like those that Equal Justice Under Law is working to modify in Missouri, only disrupt the parent-child relationship and further entrench parents in poverty.  

While courts neglect to demand more safeguards and adequate procedures, while policy makers fail to enact robust reform, and while we as a society continue to perpetuate rhetorical and cultural myths about child support obligors, more parents will be sentenced, more people will find themselves in deeper poverty, and more families will be broken. Justice for the Plaintiffs in Equal Justice Under Law’s Missouri case, the thousands of individuals trapped between poverty and parenthood, and the children and custodial parents left without any recourse or relief of their own, requires that those in power take a critical look at a system that has been uncritiqued and unchanged for decades. True and substantive support for children and their families is not accomplished by the current system of child support; we can and we must imagine something better for America’s families. Equal Justice Under Law is already imagining something better for America’s families by continuing to fight against the criminalization of poverty in the realm of child support and beyond. To follow the Missouri case, click here.