Brief
The federal government created the child support program in the 1970s to secure financial and medical support for children whose parents live separately. Today, the program collects $32 billion per year in child support payments and serves more than 16 million children and families. Still, about 35 percent of child support obligations go unpaid each month. Parents who do not pay often lack the ability to do so, due to unemployment, disability, incarceration, or other (sometimes multiple) barriers. These parents leave a significant amount of child support unpaid, and collecting that support…
Brief
This research snapshot from the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project presents findings from the Cuyahoga tests, which demonstrate that low-cost, low-effort behavioral interventions can improve child support outcomes. However, interventions that are more intensive may be necessary to increase overall child support collection amounts, perhaps because some parents have a limited ability to pay. (Author abstract modified)
Part of a series of fact sheets that discuss how and why the child support program provides innovative services to families across six interrelated areas to assure that parents have the tools and resources they need to support their children and be positively involved in raising them, this fact sheet discusses how the child support program promotes children's health. By establishing and enforcing medical support orders, the program can meet its responsibility to secure health care coverage for the children in its caseload by collaborating with private insurers, employers, Medicaid, CHIP, and…
