Child support is very important to many people but mostly to the children that are affected by divorce and separation. Child support to the children of a single parent household could actually mean the difference between having electricity and not having it or eating a hot meal or a bowl of cereal for dinner. Many things could and should be done to help with the enforcement of child support.

There were 14 million single parent families in the United States in 1998. The majority of these single parent families were headed by women. In cases of single parent families child support is absolutely necessary. Around 25.8 percent of children in the United States today that are under the age of 21 live in single parent households and roughly forty percent of those households live in poverty. Child support helps to bring the children that live in poverty due to separation of parents to a better standard of living.

Child support issues are usually handled at a state level and not a federal level. When a responsible parent is missing the state usually tries to find them through employment and unemployment records, tax records and through motor vehicle department records. There are serious penalties for not abiding by child support rules, some of which could include jail time for the most serious and losing a driver’s license for most.

Another factor in determining child support would be first determining paternity. There has been a much increased percentage of children born to unmarried mothers. Paternity must first be made before someone can be charged with the child support obligations. Most states have the authority to order a genetic test on a suspected parent in appropriate cases. In the year 1998 there were an estimated 848,000 paternities that were established by the states themselves. That number was a significant increase from twelve years before. In 1986 the number was 245,000. That is quite a jump in numbers.

Although many parents try and run from their child support obligations they must realize that the laws demanding that a non-custodial parent helps to support their child are very serious. In the year 1975 a law was passed stating that a person can not deny their child support obligations by declaring bankruptcy. In one of the federal laws about child support they do make it a criminal penalty for a non custodial parent to not pay their established child support payments for more than a year or when it exceeds $5,000. This law was established in the year 1992.

During the year of 1998 state agencies actually spent $3.6 billion to collect $14.3 billion in child support payments. These state agencies actually established 1.1 child support orders. These are insane numbers of people who do not pay their child support payments. While there has been a huge effort on the part of state agencies over the years much more is still needed. In the year 1997 there were 11.9 million female headed households that were eligible for child support. Of that 11.9 million only %59.5 were actually awarded child support. Of that number only %36.4 actually received at least one payment and only a mere %22.3 received the full child support payment. According to census data those numbers had virtually not changed since the late 1970’s, almost thirty to forty years earlier.

Children are in desperate need of support. For those people who are assigned to pay child support and do not they need to realize all they do is hurt their own children. Now each case is different but the fact still remains that too many children live in poverty because a non custodial parent can not find it in themselves to help support their own child.