For the politician seeking safe themes, neither motherhood nor apple pie will now serve.  Bitter fights over abortion and gender roles have made motherhood a minefield for the unwary, and no shrewd politician would now come out four-square for apple pie given the widespread public concerns about good nutrition and about the pesticides used by farmers (including apple growers).

But speechwriters can give thanks for the emergence of a relatively new theme sure to unite audiences in loud applause, not divide them in controversy.  On the left and on the right, the new phrase to conjure with is “child support.”  As Time reports, “the deadbeat dad” now holds a place of singular dishonor as a “selfish fugitive condemned by liberals and conservatives alike.”1  For this reason, California attorney Leora Gershenzon regards “child support [as] the best rhetoric in the world,” a rhetoric unifying political figures “from Clinton to [California’s former conservative Republican Governor Pete]  Wilson to your local DA…all say[ing] child support is a good thing.”2

This consensus of support for collecting child support reflects growing public anxiety about the poverty and deprivation of children in female-headed households. The plight of these children does indeed deserve the attention of public officials and of the electorate at large.  But as the British journalist G.K. Chesterton once observed, when considering any social evil, we must also keep in view the social ideal.  When considering the evils darkening the lives of children in female-headed households,  what social ideal should Americans and their elected officials focus on?  A raft of sociological studies has now ratified traditional wisdom in identifying the intact two-parent family as the social ideal for anyone wanting to foster children’s well-being.  The acknowledgment that many single mothers do succeed—against long odds—in rearing highly successful, law-abiding, and well-balanced children should blind no sober analyst to the overwhelming evidence indicating that children in intact two-parent families enjoy higher levels of affluence, do much better in school, succumb less often to the temptations to commit crime and abuse drugs, and maintain better physical and mental health.3

Unfortunately, in framing their child-support-collection policies, America’s policymakers have given little or no regard to the social ideal of wedlock.  Though zealous to reduce the child poverty which parental divorce has caused, they have shrunk from the task of preventing divorce in the first place.  Indeed, the policymakers pushing for tougher measures to collect child support have generally acquiesced in the liberal no-fault divorce statutes which helped to drive up the divorce rate in the first place.

Policies focused simply on reducing the economic harm that parental divorce inflicts on children may deliver some of these children from poverty.  Yet because the politicians who have framed such policies have done nothing to reinforce the social ideal of keeping children in intact families, they have—however unintentionally—actually reduced the likelihood that children will enjoy the tremendous economic, social, and psychological benefits which the realization of that ideal could bring.  Worse, by ignoring the need to foster and protect intact marriages, the advocates of ever-more-aggressive measures for collecting child support have trampled on the prerogatives of local government, have moved us a dangerous step closer to a police state, and have violated the rights of innocent and often impoverished fathers.

Few Americans would dispute a father’s obligation to provide for his children.  Throughout American history, any man who bore the title father bore also the title of provider. In the days when most Americans lived on farms, a man was more likely to discharge this obligation by filling the family granaries and storage cellars than by bringing home a paycheck—and, of course, his wife and children helped him with the necessary agricultural labors.  But in this century, as the number of family farms has dwindled, most Americans have found themselves enmeshed in a cash economy in which few fathers can work with their spouses and children in providing the resources essential to the home.  Until the 1960’s, it was generally the father alone who worked in the factory or office to support his homemaking wife and their offspring.  Working away from home to earn a paycheck inevitably shrank a man’s family role by making it much harder for him to teach or discipline his children in the way his great-grandfather did on the family farm.   Still, despite deplorable exceptions, most American men continued to shoulder the responsibility of providing for their wives and children.  Deprived of the larger family role possible on the family farm, many fathers even came to regard their responsibilities as an economic provider as the very key to their social identity. Fathers thus counted this obligation to provide for their wife and children as the most important and ennobling duty (next to that of conjugal fidelity) accepted through the vows pronounced at marriage. 

Logic of the Shotgun Wedding  

It was because of this perceived linkage between wedlock and a man’s obligation to act as a provider that in the case of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the extended family and local community often pressured the responsible young man into a shotgun wedding.  Marriage made the young man publicly take upon himself the duty to provide for the unborn child and its mother.   This shared understanding of the social meaning of wedlock thus informed a 1923 ruling by the Supreme Court of the State of Kansas in which the Justices emphasize parents’ “legal obligation…to support their legitimate child while it is too young to care for itself” (emphasis added).4  The traditional horror of illegitimacy sprang in large part from a deep anxiety about the fate of an infant who was, in social identity, no man’s child.  Since no man had every pledged to provide for that child by entering into wedding vows, the future of the child and its mother teetered in uncertainty.

True, traditional bastardy laws allowed the government to compel unmarried fathers to provide support for his children.  But enforcing such laws was difficult, since the disgraced mother and her family usually tried to keep the whole matter out of the public eye, often quietly putting the baby up for adoption so that a married father could assume the paternal responsibility of providing for the child.   Even when bastardy laws were enforced, the modest aim was merely “to relieve taxpayer burdens, not to alter the economic or social standing of the mother of the child.”5    Certainly, it is not government coercion of an unmarried father which the renowned 17th-century jurist Samuel Pufendorf had in view when he observed that with regard to their obligation to provide for their children, “parents [chiefly fathers in his patriarchal age]…joyfully undertake and discharge their duty without the compulsion of the Civil Government.”6  In Pufendorf’s era, it was widespread acceptance of the responsibilities implicit in the wedding vow which made compulsion by the Civil Government unnecessary. 

So long as illegitimacy and divorce remained rare, fathers—with few exceptions—continued to support their children without any involvement by the Civil Government, except the licensing of their voluntary wedding vows.   Divorce did begin to occur more frequently in a world in which fathers performed the task of breadwinning not on the family farm but far from home, often in daily association with women other than their wives.   Yet even in the breach, the marriage vow defined a man’s obligations to provide for his children and their mother.  For under traditional fault-based divorce, it was the violation of the wedding vows which gave the court justification for denying the father custody of the children and for requiring him to pay alimony and child support.

But consider how much weaker the government’s warrant for forcing a divorced father to make child-support payments to his former wife becomes once the question of fault has been eliminated from divorce proceedings, as it has under current law.  For unlike traditional divorce statutes, no-fault divorce undermines rather than reinforces marriage as a social ideal.  By allowing a faithless spouse to sunder the wedding vow with relative ease and without any legal condemnation, no-fault divorce trivializes marriage, making it weaker than the weakest of contracts-at-will.  It is now easier to dispose of an unwanted spouse of twenty years than to fire an unwanted employee of one year. Nor do vigorous efforts to collect child support reinforce wedlock so long as violation of the wedding covenant in no way affects how the court awards child custody or assesses child support.  In fact, by allowing a faithless wife to keep her children and a sizable portion of her former spouse’s income, current child- support laws have combined with no-fault jurisprudence to convert wedlock into a snare for many guileless men. 

Some defenders of no-fault divorce have argued that its enactment had little or no influence on actual divorce rates, which were surging upwards before its passage.  But statistician Thomas B. Marvell calculated in 1989 that the adoption of no-fault statutes had driven up state divorce rates “by some 20 to 25 percent.”7  And in a 1999 analysis, a team of statisticians determined that in the 32 states which had enacted no-fault laws by 1974, these laws “resulted in a substantial number of divorces that would not have occurred otherwise.”8  It particularly distresses attorney Steven L. Varnis that while no-fault divorce statutes have leached much of the legal meaning out of wedlock, “the content of marital vows” has remained the same as it was when traditional divorce laws were in force.9

Undermining marriage as a social ideal was not one of the objectives identified by the activists who pushed no-fault statues through in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Indeed, many of these activists claimed that their legal innovation would actually strengthen wedlock by helping men and women trapped in bad marriages to move into good marriages.  This argument looks very dubious to sociologist Norval Glenn, who cites national survey data indicating that since the enactment of no-fault laws, the probability of being in a bad marriage has “increased slightly.” Glenn plausibly suggests that the shadow of casual divorce has actually made men and women less likely to “commit fully” to a marital union, thus reducing the likelihood of marital success.10  Another reason for the ineffectiveness of no-fault divorce as a device for moving spouses out of unhappy marriages into happy ones is that aggressive collection of child support—initiated to limit the harm wrought upon children by parental divorce—”reduces remarriage probabilities among low-income fathers.”11

The Wages of ‘No Fault’  

Low income or high income, a good many innocent fathers have found that no-fault divorce delivers no happy new marriage and no chance of justice in resolving the custody and child-support disputes occasioned by the dissolution of what was for them a perfectly satisfactory union.  Although it is frequently the case in divorce proceedings that the husband has violated the wedding vows and wants the divorce, no-fault statutes do not require any such finding in order to separate a man from his children and a portion of his income.  In many cases it is the wife who has broken her wedding vows.  Yet no matter how faithless, when a wife who files for divorce (and in two-thirds of all divorce cases, it is the wife who files the petition), she can count on the state as an ally.  For as legal scholar Lenore Weitzman points out, no-fault divorce implicitly puts the state in alliance with the spouse who wants out of the marriage.  “The new law,” she writes, “elevates one’s ‘right’ to divorce over a spouse’s ‘right’ to remain married,” so “shift[ing] the power from the spouse who wants to remain married to the spouse who wants to get divorced.”12 In the same vein, Varnis observes that “the law [under no-fault] generally supports the spouse seeking divorce, even if that spouse was a wrongdoer, by granting divorces with little regard for a spouse who may not desire it.”13

Because of the continuing power of the “tender years” doctrine favoring the parent who has cared for the child during the early years, divorcing mothers still usually get custody of their children.   And under no-fault, a mother’s infidelities usually do not jeopardize her chances of winning a custody fight with a guiltless father.14  Nor do a wife’s infidelities reduce the amount of child support she is entitled to receive from her former spouse.   “A blameless father,” remarks Justice Richard Neely of the West Virginia Supreme Court, “often emerges from divorce courts with all the financial responsibility of marriage and none of its emotional or economic rewards.” In many cases, Neely explains, the victimized man is “saddled with children whom he never sees and who may even have been turned against him.”15

Under current jurisprudence, a betrayed father can expect to hear from the court whenever he falls behind in paying child support to a faithless former spouse, but he cannot ask the court to require his former spouse to give any account of how she spends that child support.  In many cases money paid for child support benefits a father’s former spouse at least as much as his children.  As Harvard scholar Martha Minow concedes, even though “child support is intended to benefit the child, not the custodial parent [generally the mother],” in fact it is “difficult if not impossible to disentangle [the child’s well-being] from the custodial parent’s standard of living.”  Since it is impossible, for instance, to provide good housing to the child without also providing it to the custodial mother, a father’s payment of child support often means “windfalls to the custodial parent.”16

Nor can a divorced father expect much help from the court in guaranteeing his visitation rights.  The state reserves all its legal rigor for the collecting of child support.   Indeed, so far as custody and child support are concerned, the current rules for divorce appear to be premised not on no-fault but rather upon an unacknowledged presumption of paternal fault.  For however guiltless he may have been in causing the divorce, the divorced father will probably lose his children and will thereafter live under court scrutiny—like a criminal on probation—to ensure that he pays the mandated child support until his children turn age 18. 

Without question, many divorced fathers are guilty of having destroyed their marriages through perfidious or violent behavior and ought to have been denied custody of their children and ought to be under court order to pay not only child support but alimony as well.  It is largely because no-fault has weakened the economic status of victimized former wives that feminist Betty Friedan, formerly a supporter, now admits, “I think we made a mistake with no-fault divorce.”17  But the plight of wives impoverished through no-fault in no way mitigates the injustice worked upon a father who never wanted a divorce nor in any way neglected his marital duties—and then unexpectedly finds himself separated from his children and under court order to make child-support payments to a faithless former spouse who wastes the money he is forced to give her, while rearing their offspring in ways totally out of harmony with his beliefs. 

Such injustices seldom receive attention from the politicians pushing for ever-more-stringent enforcement of child-support laws.  In their view, it is in the best interests of the child to ensure full collection of child support, regardless of the reason for the divorce and regardless of the father’s circumstances.   “Concern about the effects of child support enforcement on the fathers themselves has been minimal,” acknowledges a team of prominent researchers headed by Irwin Garfinkel.18  But these effects have often been severe.  Set by rigid formulae and often collected by garnisheeing wages, child-support payments often work great hardship on lower-income fathers.  Urban Institute researcher Elaine Sorensen observes that bureaucratically-established child-support orders often exceed poor fathers’ ability to pay.  Worse, she complains, when divorced fathers lose their jobs, have their wages or hours cut, or become sick or disabled, they find it very hard to get their child-support obligation adjusted accordingly.  “The process for adjusting [child-support] orders is quite bureaucratic…. According to U.S. Census data, only 4 percent of noncustodial fathers who were paying child support under an order received a downward adjustment when their earnings fell by more than 15 percent between one year and the next.”19  Such numbers give substance to analyst John Smith’s criticism that “get tough” child-support measures are “running [poor fathers] into poverty and homelessness.”20 

Should a divorced father fall into arrears in paying child support, he may lose his driver’s license, his business license, or his professional license, even if the loss of his license deprives him of the ability to pay off the amount in arrears. One divorced father whose legal fight over visitation and support payments left him so penniless that he had to live in a tent in the Santa Cruz Mountains vehemently protested, “I have less rights that a damn criminal in jail.”21

Punishing the Innocent  

Harsh policies may be in order for fathers who have caused their divorce through culpable behavior.  But under a legal regime which combines lax no-fault divorce laws with draconian child-support collection,  fathers innocent of any pre-divorce offense against their spouse are treated much the same as fathers guilty of dark infidelities.  For that matter, in the government’s crusade to collect child-support payments, divorced fathers—guilty or innocent—receive much the same treatment as never-married fathers, now often identified by blood or DNA tests.   Not surprisingly, never-married fathers typically resist the state’s efforts to collect child support—much more so than most divorced fathers.  After all, the unions which create illegitimate children have never been dignified by any voluntary public vows between the partners.  And in an age of readily available contraceptives and abortion on demand, many unwed fathers regard childbearing as entirely a woman’s decision, one for which he bears no responsibility.  After all, he has no legal right to prevent the abortion of his child.  The inconsistency in current child-support laws as they apply to unwed fathers is readily apparent to feminist lawyer Karen DeCrow, a leader of the National Organization for Women, who observes, “You can’t have a unilateral decision in the hands of women and then say he [the father] has got to pay [child support]. Right now the law is definitely unequal; men have no stake in the say of what’s going to happen.  It comes down to the whole right to choose parenthood or to choose non-parenthood…. [I]f abortion is legal, then men shouldn’t have to pay child support for a child they did not chose to have.”22

Unlike divorced fathers, who usually are quite willing to acknowledge their children and to help provide for them, never-married fathers often try to hide their relationship to children viewed as a former lover’s accident.  Biology alone cannot forge the kind of father-child relationship that marital child-bearing creates, even if the marriage later dissolves.  Yet the same state which has devalued marriage through no-fault divorce also devalues marriage through child-support policies which put divorced fathers and never-married fathers under almost identical scrutiny, viewed alike as comparable classes of quasi-criminals, perpetually under corrective supervision.  When Princeton researcher Anne Case analyzed the social effect of laws requiring identification of the fathers of illegitimate children (for the purpose of collecting child-support), she was stunned by the “perverse result” that legal measures requiring “paternity establishment to age eighteen” are  “positively and significantly correlated with out-of wedlock childbearing.”  And she was greatly relieved that in more sophisticated multi-variable statistical models, “the passage of paternity establishment to age eighteen [for the purposes of collecting child support] is associated with a 2-percentage-point reduction in the rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing.”23 

But the “perverse” correlation between paternity establishment and out-of-wedlock childbearing in the simpler statistical model may plausibly be interpreted as evidence that such measures for collecting child-support from never-married fathers are a corrective only belatedly adopted in areas in which marriage has already been sapped of its cultural and legal strength.   Further evidence of the linkage between aggressive child-support policies and the erosion of wedlock as a social ideal may be gleaned from Sweden, a country with remarkably high rates of divorce, cohabitation, and illegitimacy, but with an international reputation as a country in which “child support enforcement is ferocious.”24  As they consider the Swedish example, Americans may well wonder how government child-support officials can ever reinforce wedlock as a social ideal while following essentially the same policies whether dealing with a promiscuous unwed father or a divorced father never untrue to his wedding vows.   Such policies tend to reduce the never-married father and the divorced father alike to “sperm donors with checkbooks.”25

No Substitute for Marriage  

For advocates of vigorous child-support collection, a father’s circumstances matter very little.  All the matters is transferring resources from him to his child and the child’s mother.  Recent research validates their single-minded focus insofar as it does show that a father’s payment of child support does enhance his child’s well-being.26  But will those who truly care about children settle for the relatively meager enhancement in their well-being to be secured through collection of child support?   Should it be ignored that many of the adverse effects of parental divorce persist even when household income rises?   No.  Truly advancing the interests of children must mean reinforcing marriage as a social ideal.  For living in an intact family confers tremendous advantages in physical and mental health, academic performance, and in resistance to delinquency and drug use.  No matter how successfully they carry out their mandates, state officials collecting child support from divorced or never-married fathers can never bestow such advantages. 

Defenders of the current regime of liberal laws for divorce and tough laws for child support may argue the children’s lives will not be improved by forcing incompatible parents to live together.  But researchers report that children enjoy significant psychological and social advantages even when their parents characterize their marriage as “unsatisfactory”27 and when they report moderate amounts of spousal conflict.28  Varnis thus dismisses the argument that “it is better to have divorced parents without conflict than married parents with conflict” as “highly speculative and unsubstantiated.”29

By endorsing a regime of casual no-fault divorce, America’s policymakers gave the nation what Varnis calls “the idea of marriage as a serialized form of monogamous notarized dating with police approval, and divorce as part of a rational planned process.”30  When evidence began to accumulate that this rational, planned process was hurting children, these same policymakers responded not by reversing themselves and reinforcing matrimony.  Instead, they began devising aggressive new strategies for collecting child support.  But in hacking at the leaves of the problem rather than going to the root, policymakers have driven down the probability that children will enjoy the benefits of living in an intact family with both parents.  Further, they have led a confused nation into a bureaucratic, legal, and political quagmire. 

In 1988 Congress mandated that each state had to establish a computerized child-support registry.  Nine years later, after the expenditure of $2.6 billion, only 15 states had complied, while most found themselves “plagued with technical glitches, cost overruns, and friction with counties and court systems, some of which maintain their own child-support records.”31  In its 1997 analysis of the situation, the General Accounting Office concluded that states had “underestimated the magnitude, complexity, and costs of their [computer] projects and operations” and had been given insufficient guidance from the Federal government in trying to complete their computerized systems.32  California alone spent $171 million in a failed attempt to meet Congress’s 1997 deadline for creating their child-support registry.  The state’s second attempt likewise ended in fiasco in April 1999, with state officials in a fog even as to how much they had spent on the second failure.  “It’s an amazing mess,” declared one exasperated state legislator.33

Not that things necessarily improve once child-support computers come on line.  In one California jurisdiction (San Diego County) which succeeded in putting together a computerized system for identifying deadbeat dads, “a great number of people [have been] erroneously ensnared by computer error,” with a good many men finding themselves in legal difficulty for “hav[ing] suffered from the coincidence of having the same or similar name as a father who hasn’t paid up.”  “The computer,” explained one San Diego official, “ brings the benefit of serving a lot of cases, but it also is not real forgiving…. [H]ow do you keep the number of injustices down?  It never goes to zero.”    Some measure of computerized injustice did not trouble Lucia Edmundson of the San Diego District Attorney’s office,  who stoutly defended “a child-support net so wide that a few bystanders get caught.”  Of the innocent but falsely accused, she said, “I can understand their feelings, but they still have to prove [their innocence].  If the only alternative is to come to court, then that’s what they have to do.”34  In their push to collect child support, some public officials appear willing to push aside the traditional presumption of innocence.

Bureaucratic Nightmares   

No improvement on San Diego’s system, Wisconsin’s statewide computerized network for collecting child support(dubbed the Kids Information Data System, or KIDS) has spewed out hundreds of erroneous child-support bills, forcing many innocent fathers to waste time and money clearing themselves.  “Parents who owe nothing have been billed thousands of dollars,” reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, citing as an illustrative example the case of a 65-year-old man whose children were all in their 40’s but who nonetheless received a bill for $60,000 in child support.  Though the bill resulted from computer error, the man was compelled to clear his name.

Scores of other non-custodial parents (almost all fathers) have likewise had to pay attorneys to challenge erroneous computerized billings.  Nine out of ten such challenges are eventually resolved in favor of the accused, but the state does not reimburse those incorrectly billed for child support for their legal expenses.35

When its computerized system malfunctioned in 6% of all 1998 child-support cases, the state of Virginia at least had the grace to apologize to the 2,300 noncustodial parents (again, almost all fathers) erroneously accused of delinquency in paying child support.  But before receiving the official apology, many of those falsely accused of being child-support scofflaws had to gather the documents necessary to set the record straight.36

A different kind of computer snafu developed in Missouri, where the state’s computerized child-support system sent out hundreds of checks to incorrect addresses and—incredibly—delayed the mailing of numerous checks in cases in which fathers bewildered the computer by paying more than they were legally obligated to do.37

But in their zeal to collect child-support payments, government officials are doing more than building costly and error-prone computer systems.  They are also experimenting with new forms of coercion.  In 1995, Florida led with way by employing dogs and a police helicopter to conduct a statewide arrest sweep for deadbeat dads.38  On the Federal level, government agencies such as the FBI, the IRS, and the Justice Department are taking on responsibilities previously outside their purview in order to identify deadbeat dads and jail the recalcitrant.  Such measures do not impress Gershenzon, who believes that “the whole point is to collect money, and this approach is very expensive.…The idea is to get cash for kids, not necessarily to put bad guys in jail.  [Putting people in jail] may make you feel better, but it won’t necessarily help children.”39 

The case of Timothy Lee Dean perfectly illustrates Gershenzon’s point.  Jailed for failure to pay $50,000 in back child support, Dean incurred more than $100,000 in legal fees contesting his debt.  He finally ended up penniless, homeless, and almost blind in one eye because of a jail fight, yet his children received only a few dollars in child support—far, far less than the state spent prosecuting his case.40

Stubborn fathers are not alone in fighting against the newly aggressive efforts to collect child support.  Some state legislators think that fundamental legal doctrines are being skewed in “the frenzy to boost [child] support payments.”41  Nebraska lawmakers, for instance, have railed against the new Federal child-support directives—which states must adopt or lose Federal funds—as “a form of blackmail, a usurpation of states’ rights [which is] downright offensive.” “This is a blatant attack on the state’s ability to run the state,” protested the Speaker of Nebraska’s House of Representatives.42  In Kansas, some lawmakers have complained that in its child-support directives the Federal government has gone “too far in imposing its will on state governments,” with one legislator calling the Federal plan a type of “extortion.”43

The Federal plan for collecting child support has also alarmed civil libertarians.  To facilitate the collection of child support, Federal officials have established a national employment registry allowing them to track the job changes of those who owe child support.  Such a registry worries some observers, who see it opening “unexplored portals to surveillance” by enabling “the government [to] keep closer tabs on where everyone is working.”  Legal experts fear that the creation of this registry sets a dangerous precedent, increasing the likelihood that government will capture other data bases originally collected for business purposes.  In the opinion of one privacy expert, “It’s the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent door.”44

Even if all of their computers work properly, even if Federal and local officials can cooperate, and even if privacy concerns can be temporarily set aside, the child-support network makes a poor substitute for the intact family—even by strictly monetary measures.  For in the first place, once a divorce takes place, creating two households instead of one, there are fewer resources available for parents or children, regardless of how those resources are divided up.  “Two households,” Minow remarks, “in most circumstances, will be unable to achieve the standard of living available to the one.”45  No child-support network will ever change this reality.  Furthermore, while married fathers give their financial support directly to their children, government officials must expend one dollar for every four collected through their complex and coercive mechanisms.46

“Children Worse Off Overall”  

Policymakers have trumpeted the increases in child support collected by the government in recent years: the $14.4 billion collected by Federal and state officials in 1998 represents an increase of 80% over the $8 billion collected in 1992.47  But by another measure, government officials are merely running faster on the social treadmill created by high divorce rates and ever-higher illegitimacy rates: of children living with single mothers, 31 percent received child support twenty years ago; the percentage is roughly the same today, despite the dramatic increase in government efforts to enlarge its child-support system.48  Nor has the increase in government zeal in collecting child support come without emotional costs for the children and mothers who are supposed to be the primary beneficiaries, since recent research shows that “paying any child support increases the incidence of conflict between parents.”49  Because of such research findings, Garfinkel and his colleagues soberly concede—despite their own advocacy of more vigorous child-support measures—”stronger enforcement may make children worse off overall.”50

Instead of putting children at risk though yet more costly and politically problematic child-support strategies, it is finally time for policymakers to reinforce rather than undermine the social ideal of marriage.  “Without increasing the number of children in two-parent families,” columnist Ronald Brownstein has recently asserted, “the United States is unlikely to make the progress it wants at reducing the number of children in poverty.”51  Morley Glicken, a professor of social work at Cal State San Bernardino, goes further, suggesting that government leaders ought to “put some of [the money] spent on the collection of child support into family therapy and mandated mediation” so that “couples can work their problems out and stay together.”52

Such a reallocation of funds will require that government leaders again recognize enduring marriage as a social ideal worthy of their support as the best means of fostering children’s well-being.  This recognition will force a re-evaluation of the no-fault statutes which have so cheapened the wedding vow.  It may also force a realignment of other government policies—such as the dubious experiments with gender-role engineering in the schools and in the military and the systematic dismantling of the family wage in the workplace.  Most of all, recognizing wedlock as a social ideal will compel the surrender of the dangerous illusion that the bureaucratic machinery of child-support-collection can somehow obviate the need for the personal virtues that sustain marriage and family life.  Once we have all surrendered this illusion, then we can—with T.S. Eliot—finally break out of the spells woven by politicians “dreaming of systems so perfect no one will need to be good.”53

Endnotes

1    David Van Biema, “Dunning Deadbeats,” Time, 3 April 1995, p. 49.

2    Gershenzon quoted in Teresa Moore, “Study Slams State Crackdown on Deadbeat Parents,” San Francisco Chronicle, 23 March 1995, p. A15.

3    See Bryce Christensen, ed., When Families Fail…The Social Costs (Lanham, MD: University Press of America/The Rockford Institute, 1991).

4    Doughty v. Engler, 122 Kan. 583, 585, 211 p. 619, 620 (1923); see Bryce Christensen and George Swan, “Double Bind: The Redefinition of American Fatherhood,” The Family in America, October 1988, p. 5.

5    Martha Minow,  “How Should We Think About Child Support Obligations?” in Irwin Garfinkel et al., Fathers Under Fire: The Revolution in Child Support Enforcement (New York: Russell Sage, 1998): 304-305.

6    Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1703), Bk. 4, ch. 11, IV, p. 374; see Christensen and Swan, “Double Bind,” p. 5.

7    Thomas B. Marvell, “Divorce Rates and the Fault Requirement,” Law and Society Review 23(1989): 544.

8    Joseph Lee Rodgers, Paul A. Nakonezny, and Robert D. Shull, “Did No-Fault Divorce Legislation Matter?  Definitely Yes and Sometimes No,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61(1999): 803-809.

9    Steven L. Varnis, “Broken vows, therapeutic sentiments, legal sanctions,” Society, Nov.-Dec. 1997, p. 32f.

10  Norval D. Glenn, “The Recent Trend in Marital Success in the United States,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 53(1991): 261-270.

11  David E. Bloom, Cecilia Conrad, and Cynthia Miller, “Child Support and Fathers’ Remarriage and Fertility,” in Fathers Under Fire, 146.

12  Lenore J. Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America (New York: Free Press, 1985): 27.

13  Varnis, “Broken vows.”

14  See Matthew S. Cornick, A Practical Guide to Family Law (Minneapolis: West, 1995): 220.

15  Richard Neely, The Divorce Decision: The Legal and Human Consequences of Ending (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984): 17.

16  Minow, “How Should We Think,” p. 307.

17  Friedan quoted in Evan Gahr, “All the fault of no-fault,” Insight on the News, 28 October 1996, p. 41.

18  Irwin Garfinkel et al., Intro., Fathers Under Fire, p. 2.

19  Elaine Sorensen, “A Little Help for Some ‘Deadbeat’ Dads,” The Washington Post, 15 November 1995,  p. A25.

20  “Child Support Collections” [Letters], Los Angeles Times, 18 Oct. 1998, p. M4.

21  See Steve Johnson, “Men rebel against family justice system,” Knight-Ridder Tribune News Service, 4 March 1996,  p304K0269.

22  DeCrow quoted in Fred M. Frohock, Abortion: A Case Study in Law and Morals (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983): 78-79.

23  Anne Case, “The Effects of Stronger Child Support Enforcement on Nonmarital Fertility,” in Fathers Under Fire, p. 212.

24  “Home sweet home,” The Economist, 9 September 1995, p. 25f.

25  “Letters from the People,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 23 March 1997, p. 2b.

26  See Paul R. Amato and Joan G. Gilbreth, “Nonresident Fathers and Children’s Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61(1999): 557-573.

27  See Carolyn Webster-Stratton, “The Relationship of Marital Support, Conflict, and Divorce to Parent Perceptions, Behaviors, and Childhood Conduct Problems,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 51(1989): 417-430.

28  See Thomas L. Hanson, “Does Parental Conflict Explain Why Divorce Is Negatively Associated with Child Welfare?” Social Forces 77(1999): 1283-1315.

29  Varnis, “Broken vows.”

30  Ibid.

31  Barbara Vobejda, “Nation’s Child Support System Criticized,” Washington Post, 17 July 1997, p. A17.

32  Adam Clymer, “Child-Support Collection Net Usually Fails,” The New York Times, 17 July 1997, p. A16.

33  Nicholas Riccardi and Greg Krikorian, “State’s Child Support Computer Plan Rejected,” Los Angeles Times, 10 April 1999, p. A1.

34  Leslie Wolf, “Collecting support,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 20 Oct. 1997, p. A1.

35  Mary Beth Murphy, “Audit sought on support system,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 4 February 1997,  p.1.

36  R.H. Melton, “Virginia Falsely Threatens 2,300 In Mistake on Child Support,” Washington Post, 29 January 1998, p. D7.

37  Benita Y. Williams, “Problems plague child support system,” Kansas City Star, 3 September 1998, p. 8.

38  See Patricia Orwen, “Deadbeat dads,” Toronto Star, 9 April 1995, p. A1. 

39  Gershenzon quoted in Marlene Cimons, “New Steps Seek to Boost Child Support Collection Efforts,” Los Angeles Times, 1 January 1999, p. A13.

40  See Bill Callahan, “Deadbeaten,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 20 Oct. 1997, p. A17.

41  See Katie Kerwin, “Child support collections soar,” Denver Rocky Mountain News, 2 December 1996, p. A5.

42  See Robyn Tysver, “Federal Mandate Criticized,” Omega World-Herald, 20 April 1999, p.1.

43  Laura Scott, “A fight over deadbeats,” Kansas City Star, 8 January 1998, p. C6.

44  Penelope Purdey, “Eye on Privacy,” Denver Post, 2 March 1997, p. E1.

45  Minow, “How Should We Think,” p. 305.

46  See Varnis, “Broken vows.”

47  See Cimons, “New Steps.”  

48  See Elaine Sorensen, “Dead-Broke Dads,” Washington Post, 9 June 1999, p. A25.

49  See Judith A. Seltzer, Sara S. McLanahan, and Thomas L. Hanson, “Will Child Support Enforcement Increase Father-Child Contact and Parental Conflict After Separation?” in Fathers Under Fire, p. 181.

50  Garfinkel et al., Conclusion, Fathers Under Fire, pp. 333-334.

51  Ronald Brownstein, “National Perspective,” Los Angeles Times, 28 June 1999, p. A5.

52  Letter in “Child Support Collections,” Los Angeles Times, 18 Oct. 1998, p. M4.

53  T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, VI.