Are there Child Support Strategies that Can Help Low Income Fathers?
The Child Support Enforcement Program is sometimes viewed as not being father friendly. This perspective does not come from enforcement actions taken against fathers who have the ability to provide support for their children, but choose not to, but rather from concern about child support awards and enforcement actions that seem not to recognize some nonresident fathers are as poor as the mothers of their children. The child support community and father program providers have raised questions about how child support agencies and courts can help to make poor fathers’ child support payments manageable and, in some limited circumstances, to ease the burden of unpaid child support debt (referred to as “arrearages”). The purpose of working with fathers in this way is to encourage them to pay current child support, and structure their current and past obligations in a way that they can pay what they owe. The underlying assumption is that many poor fathers want to support their children and be
