A Whole Family Approach to Child Support in Federal Policymaking

Written By: Matthew Lyons, Khristian Monterroso, & Jess Maneely

Child support collections—totaling $29.6 billion for 12.7 million children in FY 2023—represent one of the largest cash transfers in the country and are a critical financial investment in the stability and well-being of families. In recent years, local, state, and federal child support offices started reexamining how their enforcement and collection roles can be paired with services that foster meaningful parental engagement and invest in the social and economic well-being of parents paying child support. This shift represents a movement toward a more holistic approach to supporting families for the long-term. It offers the promise of a child support system operating in alignment with the broader human services ecosystem.

In examining child support services, it is important to understand the reach they have throughout federal benefits. Across the continuum of human services programs, rules related to child support can impact whether someone qualifies for benefits, what amount they can receive, or what child support they owe. This is true for programs ranging from SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, child care, child welfare, and more. Often times, federal laws and state policy options regarding child support practices are made by individual programs in distinct silos from each other, resulting in disjointed and misaligned rules that work at odds with each other in driving positive outcomes for families involved in child support services.

Strategies for Advancing Whole Family Approaches to Economic Supports Inclusive of Child Support

While state and local human services agencies have made important strides advancing these tenets in the last two years, it has become clear that to achieve systems-level reform, agencies will need to navigate around longstanding federal policies that impede alignment. Drawing on the insights of collaborations to date, below we highlight several of the highest impact federal policy strategies that we’ve surfaced. These strategies can help create the enabling conditions for continued progress in re-centering state and local child support collaborations with other human services program areas. This is in service of improving long-term outcomes that bolster family stability and mobility, foster systems change with and for families, include diverse family structures, and adapt to changing family circumstances.

Federal Policy Strategy 1: Release Guidance on Best Practices in Child Support Cooperation Requirements

Child support cooperation requirements mandate that parents cooperate with their child support agency as a condition of receiving government benefits. Many federal benefits, including SNAP, Medicaid, and child care subsidies, provide states flexibility as to whether to establish cooperation requirements as a condition of participation, how to establish good cause from the requirement, and whether to apply the requirement to custodial or non-custodial parents or both. In other programs, such as TANF, child support cooperation is a federal requirement, though states have discretion as to how they exempt participants due to good cause.

Earlier this year, USDA released guidance to SNAP grantees, sharing the lack of strong evidence that such requirements result in positive outcomes, outlining expectations for evaluating for good cause when states select this policy option, and outlining mandated coordination with child support agencies when cooperation requirements are imposed. This type of proactive engagement of states reflects a promising approach to encourage collaboration with child support agencies and to critically revisit longstanding cooperation rules. Similar, coordinated efforts that speak consistently to states across federal benefits can help prompt thoughtful reexamination of when and how child support cooperation requirements are applied.

Federal Policy Strategy 2: Eliminate Federal Share of Retained Collections for TANF Recipients to Encourage Full Pass Throughs

smiling African American child in a nursery playing with toys

TANF recipients with child support orders must assign their rights to child support payments to their state TANF agency, which uses that money to reimburse itself and the federal government for TANF assistance. However, approximately half of states allow some or all of the child support payment to be passed through to the TANF recipient and be disregarded as income when determining TANF eligibility and benefit level. When states choose this option, federal law allows them to exempt reimbursing the federal government for its share of the child support payment up to $100 per month for a household with one child or $200 per month for a household with two or more children. If a state allows a pass through to the TANF recipient in excess of this amount, it must pay out of its own pocket to reimburse the federal government for its due share.

Recent research has shown that child support pass throughs can significantly reduce child poverty as well as increase payment rates and levels from noncustodial parents. By lifting the $100/$200 limit for waiving federal reimbursement of child support pass throughs, Congress would make it more financially feasible for states to implement such policies.

Federal Policy Strategy 3: Align Employment & Training Opportunities for Non-Custodial Parents

Through waivers, IV-D incentive funds, and collaborations with other workforce partners, at least 25 states currently provide employment and training (E&T) services for noncustodial parents in their child support program. These efforts have an opportunity to be brought to far greater scale by expanding work supports for noncustodial parents through a proposed rulemaking. One that allows for federal financial participation via IV-D child support funding for noncustodial parents.

With the potential for a dedicated E&T funding stream in child support on the horizon, the federal government can help integrate this new resource into the broader continuum of workforce development services. Programs such as WIOA, TANF, and SNAP E&T have long worked to build shared infrastructure for offering comprehensive and integrated workforce services. In early efforts to expand a robust set of services that help noncustodial parents with the tools they need to economically support their families, federal cross-programmatic efforts to align technical assistance, financing, and guidance will be key to fostering system alignment—helping this new potential funding source realize its potential.

Federal Policy Strategy 4: Support Redesign of Child Support Practices in the Child Welfare System

Child support practices can have far reaching impacts on family well-being that go beyond their direct economic consequences. In the child welfare system, when a child is removed from their home, federal law requires that states, where appropriate, act to secure assignment of child support for a child receiving federal funding for foster care payments. This direction and practice in recent years has increasingly been called into question as to its effectiveness.

Recent research shows that parents required to pay child support to offset the cost of their child’s foster care placement have lower reunification rates and higher termination of parental rights. Their children also experience longer stays in foster care. Further, evidence suggests that collection efforts for child welfare involved-families actually costs states money, as the expenses to pursue collections for this population exceed collections received.

In 2022, the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) Children’s Bureau (CB) and Office of Child Support Services (OCSS) released joint guidance adjusting federal direction in how states determine when the statutory definition of “appropriate” applies for assigning rights to child support. Since then, steady progress has been made reexamining child support practices within child welfare agencies in individual states and counties. However, deeper support from ACF in helping these agencies unwind decades of historical practices could significantly accelerate this trend. Additionally, a broader review by Congress of the underlying statute governing federal policy around child support collections for children in foster care would enhance these efforts.

Conclusion

When child support practices are designed to consider the wants and needs of the whole family and provide tools that remove barriers for parents to play a meaningful role in the lives of their children, everyone wins. The historically narrow view of the program as solely a collection and enforcement mechanism has hindered its ability to generate lasting social and economic impacts at the root level. On the other hand, states and counties are ready for change and eager to reimagine a whole family approach to child support that is fully integrated across the human services ecosystem.

Federal policymakers in Congress and the Administration can capitalize on this moment by leading the way on family-centered policy reforms that align child support practices thoughtfully across benefits and services based on what the evidence shows works and what families tell us they need.