Most Child-Support Payers Stiff Their Kids, Problem Intensifying

(MoneyWatch)  It's tough to manage your household budget when you're depending on an unreliable source of income, but that's a predicament faced by most single parents receiving child-support payments from an ex-partner.

Nearly a quarter of parents owing child support are complete deadbeats and fail to make any payments whatsoever, and another 30 percent don't pay the full amounts owed, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted in April 2008 and released today. With unemployment now exceeding 10%, those rates are expected to rise even higher this year.

The failure to pay child support compounds an already existing financial problem for custodial parents. Single parents with child-rearing duties have more limited income potential, due to child-care costs and the time they can commit to work. As a result, 25% of custodial parents had household incomes below the poverty line, compared with half that percentage of the overall population, the report said.

The recession has caused mounting financial hardship as well for many payers who've been going to court to seek reductions. Such reconsideration requests have doubled in Wayne County, Mich., where the jobless rate is near 20% due to the domestic auto-industry's woes.

The fact the divorce rate in the U.S. has been declining marginally since 1970 doesn't minimize the fallout on children, since nearly half of marriages still end in divorce. Twenty-six percent of U.S. children under 21 lived with a single parent, with mothers accounting for 83 percent of custodial parents vs. 17 percent for dads, the Census Bureau found.

Welfare reform enacted during the Clinton administration, meanwhile, has dramatically reduced the number of custodial parents on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which fell to 4.3% in 2007 vs. 22% in 1993, the bureau said.

Custodial parents seeking help in enforcing child-support payments can contact social-service agencies in their individual states. Parents paying support who've lost jobs or had their hours cut should seek to get payments reduced rather than skipping them or not paying them at all -- which can result in criminal charges.