Brief
In fiscal year 2018, noncustodial parents were obligated to pay nearly $33.6 billion in current child support on behalf of the 15 million children served by the Title IV-D child support program. One-third of that, or $11 billion, was not collected. Unemployment is the leading reason for non-payment of child support by noncustodial parents. This brief will explore the opportunities at the state and federal levels to provide employment services to noncustodial parents and increase child support payments in the process.
Brief
The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project is an ambitious effort to apply behavioral science principles to improving services related to child care, child support, and work support. As is the case with most behavioral research, the BIAS project focuses on individual client behavior. This approach provides significant benefits by allowing for low-cost, incremental improvements that can accumulate over time. One extension to this individual-level approach would be to consider the behavior of individual staff members who work with those clients. Another beneficial…
Research in behavioral economics has shown that small changes in the environment can make it easier for people to act and make decisions that support their goals. For example, research suggests that small changes to make processes easier — such as simplifying application instructions, prepopulating forms with available required information, and streamlining procedures — can improve human services program design and outcomes. The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project used behavioral insights to address issues related to the operations, implementation, and efficacy…
Other
The federal government’s support of fatherhood initiatives raises a wide array of issues. This report briefly examines the role of the Child Support Enforcement (CSE) agency in fatherhood programs, discusses initiatives to promote and support father-child interaction outside the parents’ relationship, and talks aboutthe need most see for work-oriented programs that enable noncustodial parents to have the financial ability to meet their child support obligations in a consistent and timely manner. (Author abstract modified)
Webinar
August is Child Support Awareness Month. State and local child support offices are scheduling special events to focus on the importance of providing child support for children and highlight services available to help both custodial and noncustodial parents provide for their children on a regular basis. As we heard in our March 2013 and April 2015 NRFC webinars, child support programs are evolving at the national and state levels and moving away from “welfare cost recovery” models to “family centered practices” that emphasize accurate child support orders based on actual income, family…
This report presents interim impact and implementation findings of seven transitional jobs programs from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Enhanced Transitional Jobs Demonstration. Two of the sites in that study — in Atlanta and San Francisco — are also a part of ACF’s Subsidized and Transitional Employment Demonstration. The two studies closely coordinated beyond the shared sites, including shared reports, common data collection instruments, and other ongoing collaboration.The report shares early results in the areas of implementation, employment outcomes, recidivism, and child support payment…
This fact sheet highlights outcomes of the Building Assets for Fathers and Families (BAFF) demonstration grant and describes ways that child support agencies and Assets for Independence project staff can collaborate to make asset building strategies available for parents, their children, and other family members. (Author abstract)
Child Support programs and courts across the country are connecting noncustodial parents to job services as an alternative to jail, which has achieved promising results. Job services are effectively helping parents find work, stay employed, pay child support, and avoid crime - at relatively little cost. This comparative infographic, "Jobs Not Jail", contrasts the impactful cost and benefit differences between the two. It displays how work-oriented services are successfully leveraging and achieving compliance from noncustodial parents who were once unemployed or underemployed. (Author abstract)
The first evaluation report of OCSE's Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED) documents CSPED's planning year and first year of implementation, offering insights into recruitment, engagement, collaborative partnerships, and service delivery strategies for anyone thinking about or actually implementing employment programs for noncustodial parents who are unable to pay their child support. (Author abstract modified)
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Journal Article Child support is a critical source of income, especially for the growing proportion of children born to unmarried mothers. Current social policy supports custodial parent employment (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit [EITC] and other work supports have largely taken the place of an entitlement to cash assistance for single mothers of young children). Given many single mothers' limited earnings potential, child support from noncustodial fathers is also important. This raises questions about the effects of child support on custodial mothers' labor supply, and whether policies that increase…
