The child support program appears to be meeting its goals of stronger enforcement; however, many believe more child support collections should be paid to families. Second, states can be expected to have increasing difficulty financing their child support enforcement programs. The average state now receives around 30 percent of the money it uses to finance its child support program from retained collections in welfare cases. Because the welfare caseload has been in such precipitous decline since 1994, these collections have shrunk. (Source: Brookings Institution.)

On July 7, 2000 the US Department of Health and Human Services announced the award of more than $600,000 in new grants to states, non-profit organizations, and a district court to further strengthen the nation's child support enforcement program. The grants provide opportunities to test new methods to improve child support enforcement services and form new partnerships to promote responsible parenthood.

Additional Resources on Child/Family Policy

Selected Summary Findings in Brief

Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study: (Fragile Families Research Team)

• An increase in the probability of future child support payments changes the composition of the mothers in the following respects: average education of mothers increases, average level of maternal investment in children increases.

Child Support and Father-Child Contacts in Fragile Families (July 2004):

• Upon examination of the relationship between child support payments and father-child interaction approximately one year after a nonmarital births.
• Findings suggest (albeit weakly) that living in states and cities with stronger child support enforcement regimes lead to lower levels of father-child contact.
• Nonresident fathers in the sample have high levels of contact with their children but pay little in child support. This is mostly due the short time span since these children were born (avg time 15 months) and to the contiued strength of the parents' relationships.
• In the multivariate analysis, there is a strong positive and significant relationship between whether fathers pay any formal support and whether they have contact with their children (any w/i the last 30 days or any overnight visits since birth.)
• Paying any formal child support is not associated with the number of days of contact or the number of overnight visits the father has with the child, although the direction of effects is positive.

Parents Fair Share Demonstration: (MDRC):

• As a group, the fathers were very disadvantaged, although some were able to find low-wage work fairly easily. PFS increased employment and earnings for the least-employable men but not for the men who were more able to find work on their own. Most participated in job club services, but fewer than expected took part in skill-building activities.
• PFS encouraged some fathers, particularly those who were least involved initially, to take a more active parenting role. Many of the fathers visited their children regularly, although few had legal visitation agreements. There were modest increases in parental conflict over child-rearing decisions, and some mothers restricted the fathers� access to their children.
• Men referred to the PFS program paid more child support than men in the control group. The process of assessing eligibility uncovered a fair amount of employment, which disqualified some fathers from participation but which led, nonetheless, to increased child support payments.