by Elaine M. Doxie

Created on: May 14, 2010   Last Updated: December 21, 2010

Child support is so full of catch 22's that it would be difficult to name them all at once.  Whether you owe child support, or are owed child support, it can be difficult to navigate the system successfully.  As a result, children get caught in the middle of epic battles between their parents, which boil down to money.  The family court system would have you believe that it is for the children, but in the end, it hurts the children more than anyone else.

One of these catch 22 situations is that no matter what a person's income level was during the marriage, they are required to pay if theyare the non-custodial parent.  This means that vindictive ex spouses can file for custody, get the children and be entitled to a portion of their ex's income, even if their ex had no income during the marriage.  This is often used by abusive men to penalize their ex wives for leaving them.  Abusive men love this loophole, because they can now use the legal system if their ex wives are unable to keep up payments that are inevitably set above what they can afford, since they often have little to no work experience.

Possibly the biggest problem with child support is that with the current enforcement measures, it is actually more difficult to collect child support and costs the government way too much for a program that just doesn't work.  If a person doesn't pay, and they don't have a job allowing their wages to be garnished, their passports are taken from them.  They only have to have acquired $2500 in past due payments to have their passports taken, and it rarely takes very long to get that far behind.  Although there are not many jobs that require passports, there are a few, and this reduces their possibilities of employment.  If they still can't find work, their driver's licenses are suspended.  Finding work without a driver's license is next to impossible.  They are unable to get to job interviews, and unable to travel for work.  If this has not helped them to find a job yet, they are stripped of their professional licenses so that they can no longer work in any field that requires professional licenses.  After this, the final nail is put in the coffin and they are sent off to jail unless they are lucky enough to have a friend or relative who is willing to pay their child support for them.  They are also convicted of a felony at this point in time, rendering them almost permanently unemployable and in debt for the rest of their lives, since child support debt never expires. 

The worst part of all of this is that a person's life can be ruined by a simple typo, or even a case of mistaken identity because once a person is determined to be in arrears, there is no going back, thanks to the Bradley Amendment.  The Bradley amendment makes sure that anyone determined to be in arrears has that debt on their record for the rest of their lives or until it is paid.  This means that a man who is not the father of a child, may still be on the hook for child support.  A lawyer typing in the wrong year on a divorce decree can put someone in arrears before they have even made their first payment, and that debt never goes away. 

In the end, as much as society would like to put a pretty face on things, child support is about money.  It's a fight over money and no fight, no matter how much you try to sugarcoat it, is really good for the children. 

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