Child Support Term Paper

Total Length: 826 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

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child support,' Beller (1996) highlights the issue of children being the intellectual capital of the future and suggests that any society, which wishes to safeguard the socioeconomic well being of its future generations needs to ensure that appropriate and adequate investments are made in the education and overall welfare of its children. Having, thus, tabled the enormous stake that society has in its children, Beller then discusses the unfortunately increasing trend in America today of single parent families, which has led to a sizeable number of children who suffer the outcomes from low income and smaller inputs of parental time. To emphasize the enormity of the issue, Beller cites studies that show that present trends, if unchanged, will lead to six out of every ten children who are born today spending part of their childhood in a single-parent family, usually headed by a mother.

Given the objective of insuring the socioeconomic well being of its future generations and the problem of low income/reliance on welfare faced by single parent families (in 1992, more than half of all children in mother-only families lived in poverty compared with only 10% in married-couple families), Beller goes on to suggest that regular, legally-mandated child support payments from noncustodial parents is one key solution.
Beller supports his conclusion through reasoning, backed by research evidence, that child support not only reduces the dependence on welfare but enables the single mother to find high-quality child care so that she can work: "The incomes of women who receive child support are higher than of women who do not, and the difference exceeds the amount of child support received."

Having identified child support as one major approach to resolving the problem of single-parent children suffering from low income and therefore the likelihood of poorer socioeconomic attainments as adults, Beller reviews the steps taken by Federal and State governments to enforce child support payments such as the 1984 'Child Support Enforcement Amendments' and the 'Family Support Act' of 1988 that placed primary responsibility for the support of children squarely on the parents. The result of such changes in public laws has led to some positive impact on child support payments, with available data showing notable gains for black mothers and never-married mothers and an overall analysis indicating that without the improved legal efforts, the real value of child support payments would have declined given adverse socioeconomic factors in the environment during the period being studied.

In his analysis, Beller tables not….....

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