Child Support

This practice guide is a resource for a broad range of human services programs aiming to be more inclusive of and responsive to fathers. Building on literature from the field and interviews with human services providers that engage fathers in services, this guide outlines strategies for advancing equity in human services programs:

Child support payments are associated with increased parent-child engagement, which can lead not only to better academic and social outcomes for children but also to better parent-child and parent-parent relationships. Moreover, child support payments lifted nearly three-quarters of a million families out of poverty in 2017.

Many parents owing child support may struggle with housing instability, though little research has documented the extent of this phenomenon. This brief and infographic present estimates of the percentage of noncustodial parents who are eligible for and receive housing assistance.

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Child support programs use various strategies called “enforcement tools” to collect critical monetary support for custodial families from noncustodial parents. The enforcement of child support is intended to encourage parental responsibility so that children receive financial, emotional, and medical support from both parents, even when they live in separate households.

While child support agencies have acknowledged the rise in substance use among noncustodial parents, there is little to no research that has looked specifically at this population with substance use issues and the effects of that use on child support outcomes, including payment patterns and arrears accumulation.

For child support programs, the emergence of the gig economy presents a new dimension to the longstanding challenge of establishing and enforcing child support orders for noncustodial parents working outside traditional salaried employment – in jobs that are often temporary, part-time, and contingent.

Despite broad agreement that the child support program has performed well since the passage of the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act (CSPIA) in 1998, questions remain over whether the current measures will continue to drive better performance on outcomes that reflect the child support program’s core mission.

States have the option to require recipients of child care subsidies and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to cooperate with child support agencies seeking to establish paternity and support orders; and to enforce child support obligations as a condition of eligibility.

This analysis builds on the ASPE publication on child support cooperation requirements to determine the overlap in the populations of custodial and noncustodial parents with and without formal child support orders, that are eligible for both Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and subsidized child care (CCDF).  The data used in the infographic are based on TRIM3 analysis of the 201