Enacting tougher laws
The current laws, regarding child support in America, clearly need to be reformed because they are gender biased, because they ignore a significant amount of the problem, and they are filled with flaws. According to the article "
HHS Awards Child Support Waivers to Help Promote Responsible Fatherhood":
Promoting responsible fatherhood has been a top priority for the
Clinton/Gore Administration. In 1999, $15.5 billion was collected
for children by the child support enforcement program, nearly
doubling the amount collected in 1992. Most recently, the President
announced in his 2001 budget proposal new improvements to the child
support program that focuses on increasing payments to families
and making the child support system work better. These measures
include increasing pass-through payments to families on assistance,
simplifying the distribution system to assure that more families
leaving welfare receive their child support payments, booting the
cars of delinquent parents, assuring states have procedures in
place to encourage non-custodial parents to work and requiring more
frequent updating of child support orders. Additionally, the
Administration's budget also proposes $255 million for the first
year of a new "Fathers Work/ Families" Initiative to help low-
income non-custodial parents and low-income working families work
and support their children.(HHS)
This would be the best solution for the failure of absentee parents to pay child support, if parents were required to work, but unfortunately that is not true. Also, this approach to reforming child support fails to acknowledge the fact that a large portion of single-parent families are headed by males, and society's view of a male maintaining a job differs from its view of a female maintaining a job. The idea that women can be housewives, is widely accepted, making it ever-so convenient for an absentee mother avoiding child support. How would the law ever bring those people to justice, considering that the only ways to locate the lost parents, is by withholding their earnings--which they disguise by not working--or sending them a subpoena by certified mail; however, they can totally ignore the mail, send it back to the post office, and amazingly there in nothing that the child support agency will be able to do about this situation. The writer of "Single Parenting Is an Increasingly Accepted Choice" Lara Brenckle, notes
"The percentage of households nationally headed by single parents--including those never married--rose from 5 percent in 1970 to about 9 percent in 2006, according to the latest data on America's families and households released by the U.S. Census Bureau."
Is it unlawful for the government to automatically put warrants on absentee parents, who never attempt to pay child support, until they have accumulated $10,000 or $15,000 arrearage in child support? According to the statistics, the problem is getting worse, and a more precise system of reforming absentee parents needs to be implemented in America, because the current system is a travesty.
Mandatory Behavior Modification
The law of the land is broad; certainly it can be analyzed and expanded, sot that it strengthens the relationship between absent parents and childre, rather that pushing absent parents away by mostly demanding money without emphasizing the true definition of child-support order reform:
Empowering absent parents with behavioral modification treatment so that they realize the importance of being a parent to their children in addition to the payment of child support. There should certainly be enough money in the national budget for this type of operation; after all, the Clinton-Gore Administration proposed to spend $255 million (in one year) on a basic, at best, child support reform system. The writer of "Mothers Without Custody" Geoffrey Le. Greif, notes that
"Although single custodial mothers--and, more recently, fathers with and without custody--have been the focus of research, single mothers without custody seem to have fallen through the cracks with respect to social work interest and service."
A good example of this lack of concern in a similar situation would be as follows: Suppose that a person practices football twice a week, and the training coach encourages them to do laps, exercise, eat well, study the playbook, and so forth, so that the person performs well on Sunday. The person does as told and succeeds; however, what if the coach did not encourage the player to condition in order to be the best at what they do and ultimately cut this player from the roster. This would be a very bad sign because it shows that the coach has given up on the player. When absent mothers/fathers are not being told what it is that they need to do to become better parents, assuming they do not know how, the children lose out in having a healthy relationship as well as the parent. Some absentee parents need to be reformed by being court ordered to undergo mandatory behavioral modification treatment to strengthen their relationship with their children, when they have accumalated 3,000 in arrearage, and a nationwide criminal warrant needs to be issued. Maybe the absent parent does not know the importance of being a parent and how it makes their children feel when they are not around. Children will benefit from this by being able to see their parents while they are in-patients--as they reform themselves. Also, the judges should use discretion towards the parents who have been there for the children and consider this notion, as opposed to the parents who have never done right by their kids. When a system like this arrives in America, if it ever does, we will see healthier relationships between absentee parents and children.
Enacting laws that hold both parents accountable for child abuse
The writer of "Abuse Risk Seen Worse as Families Change" David Crary, notes that "data on the 1,500 child-abuse fatalities that occur annually in the United States leaves unanswered questions. many of those deaths result from parental neglect, rather that overt physical abuse." Well this is a common occurrence on television, in the news, and media. Here is another question: Who is held accountable for these fatalities, and where are the absent parents when all the neglect cases arise? The fact remains that the custodial parents are often put in jail when their children are being abused, neglected, or maybe even killed, while the absent parents often go unpunished because they do not have custody of the children. Custodial parents need to go to jail for child neglect, abuse, or murding their childre, if they in fact did it; however, what if they did no do it and the abusive boyfriend/girlfriend did it? The point is absentee parents should be held accountable for the deaths of their children if they know that they are the biological parent, and have refused to be involved in those children's life for a substantial amount of time, which is neglect. Some parents owe tens of thousands of dollars(for child support), and are still free to walk the streets--when their children are murdered by the hands of abusive step-parents and so on, while the custodial parents involved spend years in jail for a crime they did not commit.
The opposition may say that the best child support reform system is already in place. Those in favor of the current system of child support may believe that by deducting payments from parents for children is effective because it is hard for parents to survive without a job. According to the United States "the Administrations budget also proposes $255 million for the first year of a new "Fathers Work/Families Win" Initiative to help low-income non-custodial parents and low-income working families work and support their children." That may well be a good start in the child-support system reform process;however, the admistration has launched a narrow, one-sided attempt to reform the child support system based on the assumption that if fathers work then families will win. Who was the genious that thought of this reformation system? Maybe if people took this sort of approach in everyday situations they could win at other tasks as well; for instance, let us assume that if you run through the mud to school, once you get there, you should only clean one shoe because by doing this you will keep the floor from getting dirty, never mind the left shoe because the right shoe has been cleaned. Better yet, how about we put our pants on on e leg when we dress but not the other, and then go outside; Of course we will succeed in being presentable because it is only important for one of our legs to be covered when we wear our pants. Here is a good idea that will be similar to the administration's proposal: Suppose all of our companies in America that manufacture eyeglasses make glasses with only one lense, because if you can see out of one eye you most certainly will be able to see out of the other one. Seriously, not all families win when fathers work, and if the administration is really concerned with reforming the child support system it must consider all sides of the family's concerns, issues, job situation, circumstances, and whereabouts of the children involved as well as the parents when dealing with an overall reform of the child support system.
