For years now, I've been wondering as my state has implemented nearly mandatory child support guidelines that seem very generous to the custodial parent vis-a-vis the noncustodial parent.
I've heard the complaints of women who've received nothing for years.
I've heard the complaints of men who say they cannot earn enough to satisfy these payments and who have been jailed for not paying.
Now a column on the subject has appeared by the arch-conservative lawyer Phyllis Schlafly. I have had some stark disagreements with Phyllis over the years; but I have to give her credit where it is due. The column is titled "Welfare reform meets the law of unintended consequences;" and it offers some knowledgeable legal explanations for what's been going on. Here's an excerpt:
The Great Society welfare system was recognized by the 1990s as a social disaster that created fatherless children, illegitimacy and women's dependency on government. Channeling taxpayer handouts to mothers provided a powerful financial incentive for fathers to depart; they were not needed anymore.Read the rest of her column to see how this works.
Unfortunately, policy changes in the 1988 and 1996 welfare laws created similar financial incentives for state governments to exclude middle-class fathers from the home. The law incentivized the states to manufacture "noncustodial" (i.e., absent) fathers and to order money transfers (usually through wage garnishment) to mothers, thereby putting a large segment of the middle class under the welfare bureaucrats.
I'm not convinced by her conclusion that the system has created single parent households. Marriages rarely break up because the woman is seeking that outcome, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteHowever, once broken up, the system definitely works against co-parenting, as she describes.
I saw it when I worked in social services in behalf of homeless men, though I didn't fully recognize what was happening then, assuming the men had flaws that drew these punitive desserts. Until it happened to me.
As it turned out, that phrase "the best interests of the child" was anything but. The experts, the counselors and the quasi-judicial government agencies wielded it like a bludgeon. For example, I was living in my van, jobless, when I had my two year chance to appeal the support order. The Children's Services guy ruled I was "capable" of earning "$X per hour" because I'd done so once, for 3 months, seven years earlier.
It was four years later before I earned '$X' again. And because experts said it was risky to kids to put them in the middle of a courtroom fight, I avoided that option like the plague till the kids were nearly grown.
To his credit, the judge set a reasonable support level, 10 years after the first support order led me to the first of my periods of intermittent homelessness (after their cut, I couldn't afford an apt in the cheapest area of the city). The only part of the system that proved fair to me was the courtroom, but the experts - and my ignorance - had kept me from that option for a decade.
Now, with my kids fully grown, I still carry a huge pastdue amount and expect to carry a balance well into retirement. Their mother largely raised them at a comfortable middle class level, a level I've never experienced for myself.
And my kids? All went through periods of depression, suicide attempts and none graduated high school, though all were at 'TAG' levels of intellect. It's taken years to rebuild their lives and my life and our relationships.
Their interests were not served. And I'm convinced family courts should consider the best interests of each family member, as the best 'health' of both parents provides the best for the kids, if both parents display an active, loving interest in their kids. But courts don't weigh that. They assume the non-custodial parent will be deficient, then structure the outcome on that flawed assumption.
I was a good dad, till the divorce happened and I felt like the system was assigning me the role of a criminal suspect from that point on.