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Support Guidelines (support + guideline)
Kinds of Support Guidelines Selected AbstractsVISITATION AND CHILD SUPPORT GUIDELINESFAMILY COURT REVIEW, Issue 2 2004A Comment on Fabricius, Braver Fabricius and Braver argue that nonresident fathers incur appreciable visitation expenses and that their child support obligations should be reduced accordingly. To assess whether fathers incur "appreciable" expenses requires data from mothers and fathers on expenditures in dollar terms rather than data from college students on items kept in the nonresident father's house. The Fabricius and Braver data also overstate the degree to which all divorced fathers do anything for their children. Representative data indicate that father visitation declines substantially over time. Father's postdivorce, post,child support standard of living remains twice that of mothers and children. The cliff model,making adjustments for visitation only in the rare cases of very high shared physical custody,is sensible policy. [source] TURNING OFFENDERS INTO RESPONSIBLE PARENTS AND CHILD SUPPORT PAYERS,FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Issue 3 2005Esther Ann Griswold This article describes four demonstration projects that strive to promote responsible behavior with respect to parenting, child support payment, and employment among incarcerated and paroled parents with child support obligations. These projects, conducted in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas, with support from the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement and evaluated by the Center for Policy Research, led to a number of common outcomes and lessons. The projects revealed that inmates want help with child support, parenting, and employment and that prisons can be effective settings in which to conduct such interventions. Family reintegration programs were popular with inmates and may have helped to avoid the rupture of parent,child relationships commonly associated with incarceration. Although employment is the key to child support payment following release, rates of postrelease employment and earnings at all project sites were low and the employment programs were of limited utility in helping released offenders find jobs. Agencies dealing with child support, employment, and criminal justice need to adopt more effective policies with incarcerated parents including transitional job programs that guarantee immediate, subsidized employment upon release, child support guidelines that adjust for low earnings, and better training and education opportunities during incarceration. [source] EXPENDITURES ON CHILDREN AND VISITATION TIMEFAMILY COURT REVIEW, Issue 2 2004A Reply to Garfinkel, McLanahan, Wallerstein In their critique, Garfinkel, McLanahan, and Wallerstein raise concerns about the representativeness of the authors' sample, benchmark approach methodology, and historical review of guidelines, all of which lead them to discount the evidence presented opposing the cliff-model assumption of father expenditures on children, and to laud instead child support guidelines that give little monetary credit or adjustment for visitation. This article presents evidence that (a) this sample is at most little biased, and remains trustworthy for the main implications presented; (b) although only a beginning, the benchmark approach is highly useful and most of the concerns raised about it are ill founded or implausible; and (c) the historical review suggesting that current guidelines assume zero visitation expenses is indeed accurate for the vast majority of states, according to the foremost authority. Thus, notwithstanding the critique, these findings have merit and importance and should be considered by policy makers. The authors also comment on the additional arguments against continuous and generous adjustments for visitation, finding them based on a weak foundation of evidence and reasoning. [source] Intuitive Lawmaking: The Example of Child SupportJOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2009Ira Mark Ellman Setting the amount of a child support award involves tradeoffs in the allocation of finite resources among at least three private parties: the two parents, and their child or children. Federal law today requires states to have child support guidelines or formulas that determine child support amounts on a uniform statewide basis. These state guidelines differ in how they make these unavoidable tradeoffs. In choosing the correct balance of these competing claims, policymakers would do well to understand the public's intuitions about the appropriate tradeoffs. We report an empirical study of lay intuitions about these tradeoffs, which we compare to the principles underlying typical state guidelines. As in other contexts in which people are asked to place a dollar value on a legal claim, we find that citizen assessments of child support for particular cases conform to the pattern that Ariely and his co-authors have called "coherent arbitrariness": the respondent's choice of dollar magnitude may be arbitrary, but relative values respond coherently to case variations, within and across citizens. These patterns also suggest that our respondents have a consistent and systematic preference with respect to the structure of child support formulas that differs in important ways from either of the two systems adopted by nearly all states. [source] |