Child Support

Child Support Enforcement and Guidelines are Unrealistic

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By Joe Jones ( jj****@cf**.org ) – the founder of the Center for Urban Families in Baltimore and Joan Entmacher Joe Jones ( je********@nw**.org ) is the vice president for Family Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center.

Raising a child takes a lot of love, time and money — and doing it alone is tough. Children need and deserve support from both their parents. The goal of an effective child support enforcement system should therefore be to ensure that both parents are responsible for supporting their children as they grow into adulthood. Unfortunately, for parents struggling on the economic brink, the system too often fails them and their children.

We’ll start off by stipulating that noncustodial parents (usually the father) who refuse to pay support to their children even though they are able to pay should have the full force of the law brought against them to collect payment. But often, it’s more complicated than that. About 70 percent of uncollected child support is owed by parents with no reported income or reported income of less than $10,000 a year. While some of these debtors may have unreported income, many are poor themselves. Moreover, when a parent is incarcerated, arrears can continue to pile up to the degree that they will never be paid back, especially with diminished job prospects facing workers with a criminal record.

Unrealistic support orders don’t help anyone. The mother and child don’t see the payments, and the father, too poor to pay, can end up in a vicious cycle with the criminal justice system that amounts to a modern day debtor’s prison.

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Child Support Enforcement recently published a proposed rule that would update the nation’s child support system. Among other things, the rule would ensure that states take into account the noncustodial parent’s ability to pay in setting child support orders, including stopping the practice of treating incarceration as “voluntary unemployment.” This is a critical component of bipartisan efforts to reform our criminal justice system as it would help stop the vicious cycle of debt and incarceration that fills our prisons with men who are too poor to pay, helping neither the men, nor the families they owe support to.

The rule would also enable states to provide job services, so that out-of-work parents can more quickly get on track to take financial responsibility for their children.

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Unfortunately, some members of Congress are trying to block the implementation of these modernization efforts, claiming that they are “letting delinquent parents off the hook.” That is simply not the case.

The National Women’s Law Center supports many of the proposals by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement to improve our nation’s child support program. Improving the fairness of the program for low-income noncustodial parents doesn’t mean that custodial parents and children will lose. In fact, research shows that the proposals would likely increase the support that low-income custodial parents and children receive. Some states are already taking steps to ensure that orders are set at realistic levels, to prevent arrears from building up when parents are incarcerated and to offer employment services to noncustodial parents who face many of the same barriers to employment that custodial parents do. By preventing the buildup of impossible levels of child support debt — creating additional barriers to employment and the ability to pay support — these policies have increased child support payments for low-income families.

Read the entire pice HERE: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-child-support-20150806-story.html

Child Support, Divorce, Family, Fatherhood, Marriage, Parenting

It is too late

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Men

It seems as if we have this, “I will figure it all out” mentality embedded in us. We may hear things from older people or from those who may have gone through a similar life experience, but we think we can find a better way to design the wheel.

Sometimes it saddens me.

I get a lot of emails, texts messages or Facebook messages from those who want to speak to me about my family court adventures and dealings with a high conflict ex. I get plenty of them. I usually ask them to reach out to me.

They somehow magically forget to do this, or never follow up. I used to wonder why this happened and would think to myself that maybe they figured out whatever problem they were dealing with, an/or don’t need my advice.

What always seems to happen is that the next time I catch up with them, they tell me what a rough time they had in court, they tell me how they have to pay crazy amounts of child support, they tell me they never see their kids, they tell me they are depressed, they tell me they don’t know what to do.

I get it.

I understand that we want to find the way to the destination without a map or without the passenger giving you directions because you feel more in control.

Well fellas, I hate to break it to you but, when you are dealing with an ex wife or baby momma who is hell bent on giving you hell for 18-21 years, you might want to think things through before you walk through this mine field. By the time you reach out to me, you are probably already caught up in your ex’s narcissistic vortex, or you are in the claws of the state and federal child support system…and it is too late!

I have done a lot of the research and have already walked in your shoes. I have spent the past 8 years of my life studying marriage, gender politics, the family court system, mediation and have personally spent years in and out of family court. The difference between you and me is that I have come though it all being on the winning side. I did my research before I got caught up. I planned ahead. I took the road less traveled and am a much happier man because of it. I am the father I wanted to be and not the one I was forced to be. I was thinking three steps ahead of my adversary and am not playing catch up. I took care of business before it was too late

I would love for you to read this piece I wrote a few years ago. I would love for you to have this sink in, but follow this blog so you can get a few tidbits of wisdom from someone who had seen the dark side, yet come through with a much brighter outlook on life, even if my life isn’t exactly where I want it to be.

When I hear of guys getting stuck with enormous child support bills, not seeing their kids, being pissed at their ex for constantly pushing their buttons and using their children as pawns, it angers me.

I must say, a lot of that stuff can really be avoided. It will cost you money to make sure that you will possibly be in a better position with your future ex, but persistence really does pay off. I am living proof that it works.

Stay tuned for more in the next few weeks. Use the #SoCraddockMethod and you might come out ahead.

Child Support

Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.

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An excerpt from HERE: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/us/skip-child-support-go-to-jail-lose-job-repeat.html?smid=fb-share

There is no national count of how many parents are incarcerated for failure to pay child support, and enforcement tactics vary from state to state, as do policies such as whether parents facing jail are given court-appointed lawyers. But in 2009, a survey in South Carolina found that one in eight inmates had been jailed for failure to pay child support. In Georgia, 3,500 parents were jailed in 2010. The Record of Hackensack, N.J., reported last year that 1,800 parents had been jailed or given ankle monitors in two New Jersey counties in 2013. (The majority of noncustodial parents nationwide are men.)

Unpaid child support became a big concern in the 1980s and ’90s as public hostility grew toward the archetypal “deadbeat dad” who lived comfortably while his children suffered. Child support collections were so spotty that in the late 1990s, new enforcement tools such as automatic paycheck deductions were used. As a result, child support collections increased significantly, and some parents rely heavily on aggressive enforcement by the authorities.

 

But experts said problems could arise when such tactics were used against people who had little money, and the vast majority of unpaid child support is owed by the very poor. A 2007 Urban Institute study of child support debt in nine large states found that 70 percent of the arrears were owed by people who reported less than $10,000 a year in income. They were expected to pay, on average, 83 percent of their income in child support — a percentage that declined precipitously in higher income brackets.

In many jurisdictions, support orders are based not on the parent’s actual income but on “imputed income” — what they would be expected to earn if they had a full-time, minimum wage or median wage job. In South Carolina, the unemployment rate for black men is 12 percent.

The Obama administration is trying to change some of these policies, proposing to rewrite enforcement rules to require that child support orders be based on actual income and consider the “subsistence needs” of the noncustodial parent, to bar states from allowing child support debt to accrue while parents are incarcerated and to finance more job placement services for them.

“While every parent has a responsibility to support their kids to the best of their ability, the tools developed in the 1990s are designed for people who have money,” said Vicki Turetsky, the commissioner of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. “Jail is appropriate for someone who is actively hiding assets, not appropriate for someone who couldn’t pay the order in the first place.”

Under a 2011 Supreme Court ruling, courts are not supposed to jail a defendant without a specific finding that he or she has the ability to pay. But that process does not always work as intended, especially when the client does not have a lawyer, advocates for the poor say.

In the Georgia class-action case, the plaintiffs were jailed in civil contempt-of-court proceedings in which they did not have lawyers. They included three veterans — one who had paid $75,000 in child support but fell behind when he lost his civilian job because of combat-related stress and family deaths; a second who was mentally ill and had a letter from a Veterans Affairs doctor saying he was unable to work; and a third who was incarcerated despite having paid $3,796 toward his debt by working odd jobs.

But the Georgia Supreme Court ruled against them, saying they did not have a categorical right to a lawyer.

Read the entire piece HERE

Family, Fatherhood, Marriage, Society

Divorced parents support bills to change child custody standard

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People who feel they have been treated unfairly by Maine’s family court system Tuesday urged the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee to change how judges decide custody issues.

Two bills — LD 346 and LD 642 — would require judges to consider the value of having both parents involved in the lives of their children following a divorce. That would be an addition to the current legal standard of making decisions based on what is in the “best interest of the child.”

John Simpson, a Cumberland Foreside attorney and divorced father of two, urged the committee to recommend to the Legislature that the bills be enacted. He told the committee that his wife filed for divorce in 2013 and, initially, the couple was able to equally share the residential care of their children, now 5 and 3.

“Unfortunately, we could not agree on a permanent parenting schedule,” Simpson said. “I thought continuing with our shared schedule would be best for the children, but my wife wanted the children to live primarily with her.”

His voice breaking with emotion, Simpson told the committee that “despite clear proof that shared primary residential care was working very well for our children, the court accepted the guardian ad litem’s 1950s vintage opinion that young children should primarily reside with their mother. My children now spend twice as much time with their mom than their dad for no rational reason.”

Simpson recommended that judges who want to know what is in the best interest of the children of divorcing parents should ask the children.

About half a dozen other divorced parents echoed Simpson’s concerns and his emotional distress over the final custody decrees in their cases. Most complained about how the guardians ad litem assigned to their cases “misrepresented” the facts of their cases to judges.

Read more HERE:http://www.omaha.com/news/legislature/divorced-dads-plead-with-lawmakers-for-more-time-with-their/article_33d5ffa1-641d-54e5-8dec-0bfa0bd98c37.html