Too Much, Too Little, or Just Right? Recent Changes to State Child Support Guidelines for Low-Income Noncustodial Parent
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Too Much, Too Little, or Just Right? Recent Changes to State Child Support Guidelines for Low-Income Noncustodial Parents Leslie Hodges 1
& Lisa
Klein Vogel 2
Accepted: 5 October 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract There are growing concerns that current child support guidelines may result in “too high” orders likely to go unpaid and resulting in substantial debt. Recent federal legislation reflects these concerns by requiring states to consider the noncustodial parent’s ability to pay when setting child support orders [45 C.F.R. § 302.56(c)(1)(ii)]. However, this legislation leaves states to determine how to balance the economic needs of paying parents and their children. This paper explores how this flexibility affects the extent of variation in order amounts for low-income parents across states. To better understand how states interpret this new ruling and implications for order amounts, we conducted a cross-state comparison of recent changes to state child support guidelines for low-income payors and calculated order amounts for several types of cases. We find that states fall on a spectrum of how they conceive of parental financial responsibility versus parental self-sufficiency in their policy. Some states view noncustodial parents’ responsibilities for their children’s financial needs as secondary to parents’ abilities to meet their own basic needs; others view children’s needs as coming first; and many fall somewhere in between. Our findings add to current understanding of how child support agencies and lawmakers attempt to address the financial needs of low-income families through policy and statute. We find that having generous self-support reserves and no minimum orders allows states to maximize noncustodial parent income. However, if states seek to maximize financial contributions to children, more graduated adjustments to order amounts may be preferable. Keywords Child support policy . Child support guidelines . Child support order amounts .
Child support order burden . Noncustodial parents . Low-income children and families
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s42972-020-00016-9.
* Lisa Klein Vogel [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Journal of Policy Practice and Research
Introduction This study examines recent changes to state child support guidelines and child support order amounts for low-income noncustodial parents. It is increasingly common for children in the USA to live in single-parent households (U.S. Census Bureau 2019), and it is well recognized that living in a single-parent household is a risk factor for child poverty (National Academies of Sciences 2019). One in four children lived apart from one of their parents in 2016 (U.S. Census Bureau 2017), and 30% of children in custodial parent families lived in poverty, compared with 11% of other children in 2017 (Grall 2020). Child support paid by the parent living apart from the child (th
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