Does Strengthening Child Support Enforcement Actually Make CHildren Worse off by Reducing the Informal Support They Receive?

Theresa Heintze
School of Social Work - 803 McVickar Hall
Columbia University
622 West 113th Street
New York NY 10025
(212) 854 2329
FAX: (212) 854 2975
th412@columbia.edu
 
Irwin Garfinkel
School of Social Work - 810 McVickar Hall
Columbia University
622 West 113th Street
New York NY 10025
(212) 854 8489
FAX: (212) 854 2975
ig3@columbia.edu
Background:  Qualitative research suggests that when men are made legally responsible for child support payments, they are less likely to give any informal support to the mother.  When the mother is a recipient of welfare, she is obliged to aid authorities in establishing a child support order and any support paid by the absent father is principally retained by the state to offset the cost of assistance benefits. For welfare participant mothers, more stringent enforcement of support obligations will not increase children's income to any large extent and, if informal support is thereby reduced, may lower children's standard of living.
 
Purpose:  Using quantitative methods we ask:  are those women on welfare with child support orders less likely to receive informal support from the fathers of their children than are other, similar women?  Does strengthening child support enforcement reduce children's income overall?
 
Methods:  We use the Current Population Survey and the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the above questions.  We use a logistic regression framework to examine informal support received, and two-stage least squares to address the simultaneity between the establishment of child support obligations and informal support receipt.
 
Results:  Preliminary results indicate that women in contact with the child support enforcement authorities are less likely to receive informal support.  However, it is not clear that if they were not in the child support enforcement system that they would receive informal support.
 
Implications for Policy: If more detailed analysis indicates that contact with the child support enforcement authorities reduces informal support this implies that the current policy of identifying absent fathers may have unintended consequences that reduce the well-being of children by reducing the income they may otherwise receive.