A Complete Parent: towards a new vision for child support

 

 

Adrienne Burgess, Institute for Public Policy Research 1998

 

SUMMARY

The child support obligation has been widely depicted as a punishment for the feckless and an imposition on the virtuous, with policy focused exclusively on coercion. This paper takes a different perspective, suggesting that while enforcement can be useful and necessary, to regard it as the first and primary option may waste time and money, and may even be counterproductive.

IPPR believes that non resident fathers should be valued for more than their pay-packets and that policy initiatives should appeal to their sense of pride. Policy-makers should seek to identify, and dismantle, barriers deterring non resident parents from meeting child support obligations.

Underlying the IPPR approach is the knowledge that:

• most fathers love their children and want to provide for them
• failure to pay child support is not a "one off event" but is part of a process, and potential defaulters can often be identified before their children are born
• non-compliance is not primarily a gender issue (non resident mothers are even less likely to pay child support than non resident fathers) but arises from the non resident family structure
• child support by the non resident parent is of unique importance: children receiving regular support do better than children supported to the same economic level from other sources
• the fathers most likely to pay regularly, and to provide other resources, are those who are enabled to have substantial, ongoing contact with, and responsbility for, their children

 

Included in IPPR's recommendations for supporting voluntarism in child support are:

• in the child support legislation and literature, to replace the terms parent with care and absent parent with the more neutral resident and non resident parent
• to allow parents on benefit to keep some of the money contributed by the non resident parent, before babies are born, to identify and work with fathers who are reluctant parents
• to adopt new measures to establish paternity
• to extend automatic parental responsibility to unmarried fathers
• to provide couple-support for expectant and new parents, so that marriage-breakdown is prevented or delayed and more fathers are co-resident with their children for longer periods
• to help non resident parents obtain housing suitable for caring for children
• publicly to promote job training and opportunities for non resident, as well as resident, parents
• to facilitate childcare by non resident fathers, alongside childcare provision for lone mothers
• to extend mediation in divorce to all separating couples with children, whether married or not
• to develop parent education programmes for divorcing couples and support for their children
• to eliminate, where possible, "visitation" fatherhood, and support both separated parents in providing substantial day-to-day care for their children
• to change the benefit regulations so that parents with shared care arrangements can split child benefit between them, and can both claim other benefits in respect of their children
• to enforce contact orders, and provide expert counselling where children are refusing contact
• to impose a legal obligation on non resident parents to maintain personal relations and direct contact with their children on a regular basis, enforceable at the suit of the child

 

For more information contact the Institute for Public Policy Research.