First, Do No Harm

Nobody said child support was simple. People are messy and families are complicated. When parents live in separate homes the complexity increases by an order of magnitude. Even if we just consider our role as financial, things are harder. It is more expensive for three (or four or six) people to live in two houses than in one. And that's just for starters -- soon there is another family or two mixed in as new relationships begin. More adults. More kids.

But it's a vacuous to look at child support in a vacuum.  After all, the congressional version of child support system was originated to reimburse welfare expenditures in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) days. AFDC existed to support families with children because as a society we care about the welfare of kids. So let's look at the bigger picture.

Even back in the AFDC days we knew that kids needed to not be hungry and cold if we wanted them to grow up to be good, healthy, productive members of our communities. More recent studies in brain science have helped us put the story together even more fully. Living with just a few adverse experiences growing up -- especially, but not just in the first few years -- have lasting effects on a child's long term outcomes and their ability to make good decisions as adults.

One of the classic indicators is the separation or divorce of parents. In the child support business, that's a given.  But that's also the catalyst for more contributing factors. While living with poverty is not in and of itself an ACEs indicator, there is a strong link between poverty and a higher ACEs score; likewise not having two contributing parents. The entry level, given condition of children in the child support caseload is a connector to life-long issues. Okay. So what do we do?

Well, we look at the whole picture -- the whole family. Simply taking money from one parent and giving it to the other without regard to the effects on the paying parent and the paying parent's new family just exacerbates the problem. It may relieve the poverty condition of the child to some degree, but often creates a poverty condition for other children. Additionally, it can drive a wedge between the relationship of the paying parent and the receiving parent, leading to a distancing between the paying parent and the child or children.

As a child support community we have taken many steps to help remedy the vicious circle -- we are trying to "right size" orders. We are re-considering how we might credit "in-kind" payments. We are recognizing the importance of access and visitation time and co-parenting and shared custody. These steps are difficult to take as we continue to serve our customers without interruption, but we are exploring and pursuing and looking for solutions never-the-less.

Now we need our partners and stakeholders to recognize our efforts and join with us -- or let us in, depending on perspective. We need parents who owe support to receive the same services and support they'd be eligible for if they lived with their child, the same job training, job support, and public assistance. We need congress to recognize the importance of the parent-child relationship and provide the money necessary to provide parenting plans with orders and to provide co-parenting classes.

We as child support leaders need to be at the table, figuring out with our peers in just about every agency how the puzzle fits together and what our role is. These are the baby steps we need to take to improve the service our agencies and our sister agencies provide on a whole-case level.

And at the same time, on a case-by-case level, we need to make sure on every case we are considering the effect we have on every person related to the case, and try as best we can to do no harm.