Positive side effect from child support

Fewer unwed mothers have children in states that don’t easily let fathers off the hook for child support, a new study shows.

In what appears to be an unintended consequence of a social policy that historically has been aimed at improving children’s lives, and secondarily at reducing public welfare costs, University of Washington and Columbia University researchers have found that states tough on child support enforcement have up to 20 percent fewer births to unmarried women.

“What we found is that when men are more likely to be made financially responsible for children born out of wedlock, out-of-wedlock births go down,” said lead author Robert Plotnick, a professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs.

Children who receive child support have more contact with their fathers, get better grades, stay in school longer and have fewer behavioral problems than their peers who don’t receive support. Child support comes from mothers in 3 percent of Texas cases.

Since children of single parents tend to be poorer and suffer additional related social ills, policymakers have long sought to reduce births to unmarried parents.

Those efforts have mainly focused on single mothers, restricting their welfare benefits and adding work requirements, but they’ve done little to stem the rise of single motherhood.

Well under 10 percent in the 1960s, births to single women made up 34 percent of all U.S. births in 2002.

Texas ranks slightly less than the national average, at 32.4 percent.

“Decisions about sexual intercourse and marriage involves two people,” said study co-author Irwin Garfinkel, a nationally recognized figure in child support studies at Columbia University. “But research and policy debates have largely failed to recognize men’s role.”

Plotnick, Garfinkel and social scientists from Princeton and Seoul National University in South Korea compared child support enforcement among states.

They looked at eight categories of child support laws, from paternity testing to wage withholding. They also looked at the amount each state spent on enforcement, divided by the number of single mothers.

The state-by-state measures were then matched to national data on families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1980 to 1993, the most recent period available.

Using a national sample of 5,195 women of childbearing age, researchers found a significant correlation between tough enforcement and fewer unmarried births.

Texas ranks above average in state efforts at child support enforcement.

In 2004, the state collected a record $1.68 billion, about 60 percent of child support owed. Almost 70 percent of that, $1.25 billion, came through garnished wages.

Texas also ranked among the top five states to reduce out-of-wedlock births in 2002 and 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The state attorney general’s office, which is responsible for child support enforcement, is “very aggressive,” said spokeswoman Janece Keetch.

In addition to enforcement, Keetch said, the office also offers prevention curriculum for middle and high school students on the responsibilities of parenting.

“We talk about the obligation to establish paternity,” the first step in enforcing child support, she said.

Increased child welfare has always been the first goal of child support legislation, notes Plotnick. A reduction in out-of-wedlock births was an overlooked side benefit — until now.

“Social policies sometimes have unintended bad side effects,” he said, “so it’s nice to see one that has positive impacts.”