A child sits in a pitch black room wishing he had a better life, wishing he was someone else. He is deeply depressed and in pain. His father has been arrested and taken away from him again. The father is incapable of finding a good job due to his past mistakes and is forced to do grunt work. He can not afford to support both his children and his self, so he chooses his children and is forced to move around from house to house. Now he is homeless and rarely gets to see his children. This is just one of the few unknown side effects of the harsh enforcement of child support laws. While child support laws were created with good intent and are in effect to help divorced parents to provide for their children, there are many cases in which these laws cause more harm than good. Parents that are present and active in their children’s lives should not be forced by law to pay child support.
Child support has become a growing issue in America, however it has existed long before the development of the United States. The oldest known recording of the idea of child support can be traced back to seventeenth Century England. The original purpose of child support was to ensure that parents that had either abandoned their children or divorced their spouses, did not flee their responsiblities to help provide for their children financially. Child support laws were not present in the United States as federal laws up until 1935 when the Federal government decided to implement welfare for children and families with absent or deceased parents. Child support laws were not actively enforced until 1949 when New York noticed that too many fathers were abandoning their families and refusing to pay child support. As a result to this large group of unpaying fat...
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...go serious emotional and mental stress. There are however, more than enough cases in which the harsh enforcement of child support was more than necessary. However, in these cases the father has normally abandoned his children and refuses to own up to his responsiblities as a parent.
Works Cited
Cashmore, Judy, and Patrick Parkinson. "Children's Participation In Family Law Disputes: The Views Of Children, Parents, Lawyers And Counsellors." Family Matters 82 (2009): 15-21. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.
Cassity, Judith. The Parental Child-Support Obligation. Canada: Heath and Company, 1983. Print.
DuCanto, Joseph N. "Delinquent Child Support -- Making A Federal Case." American Journal Of Family Law 27.2 (2013): 138-142. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.
Lieberman, Joseph I. Child Support in America. Yale University, 1986. Print
Men have changed as well; men didn’t used to think that children were their responsibility. If they didn’t want to give their child financial support, they would simply leave and they didn’t spend time with their children, if they didn’t want to. However, things have changed as now, men are required by the law to support their children financially even if they get a divorce. Moreover,
According to many the custody of a child should be determined with the best interest of the child in mind. However, it is not easy for a judge to make such an important decision in such a short amount of time with limited information. Smith (2004) stated that, the simple fact of being a mother does not indicate a willingness or capacity to render a quality of care different than that which a father can provide. Some might argue that what Reynolds (2004) calls deadbeat dads, or in other words fathers who refuse to pay their child support, are often times confused with Turnips, who are ex-spouses who can not afford to pay child support. One example of a turnip is a father who is in prison; he is obviously not making money while he is on the inside. Now an example of a deadbeat dad is when the father is enjoying all the finer things in life and he cannot reach far enough into his...
The goal of Juvenile Courts and the Child Welfare Agencies is to protect and make decision in the best interest of children. The ASFA law was signed by President Bill Clinton. On November 19, 1997 after it was approved by the United States Congress earlier in the month. The law was the most significant piece of legislation dealing with child welfare in twenty years. States decided to interpret the law as requiring biological families to be kept together no matter what, but the law shifted emphasis towards children health and safety concerns and away from a policy of reuniting children with their birth parents without regards to their prior abuse. ASFA lead sponsor, Republican Senator John H. Chafee of Rhode Island said, “We will not continue the current system of always putting the needs and rights of biological parents first … It’s time we recognize that some families simply cannot and should not be kept together.” This phil...
In Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982), the U.S. Supreme Court held that “Parent and children enjoy a fundamental, constitutionally-protected right to family integrity.” And in Custody of a Minor, 377 Mass. 876 (1979), the SJC held that “Loss of a child custody may be as onerous a penalty as the deprivation of the parent’s freedom.” Most importantly, it is the public policy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that a child’s welfare is best served in the care and custody of her parent. See Petition of Department of Public Welfare to Dispense with Consent to Adoption, 383 Mass. 573, 587 (1981). Moreover, in a Care and Protection case, the ‘integrity of the family is threatened by government intervention’; in order to protect the rights at issue, the requirements of due process must be throughout the proceedings. See Department of Public Welfare v. J.K.B., 379 Mass. 1, 3 (1979). Based on these mentioned rationale, reasons and decision, DCF has created rules and regulations to guide its conducts operation and above all, its decision to protection children in need.
In 2007 there were approximately 77,200 fathers and 65,600 mothers incarcerated in the United States (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007). As our society continues to grow, our jail and prison population are growing as well. When a parent or guardian is taken into custody the juvenile (child) is taken and released to a relative or child protective services. The children are either given to a close family member or a surrogate parent, meaning a foster home. This may have an emotional impact on the juvenile involved, which may lead them to committing delinquent acts. The children sometimes feel they are left to fend for themselves emotionally and the stress of these emotions are left upon the guardian at the time. These intense sufferings sometimes leave the juveniles in a harmful mental state resembling depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and feelings of abandonment from their parents/guardians. Children with incarcerated parents are five times more likely than their peers to commit crimes (Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 2008).
First, I provide two interesting cases which clearly demonstrate my reasoning that prosecution of child support makes a man run by violating his civil liberties. My presentation begins with, Robin Miller. He’s what some would call a “deadbeat dad.” The story, as he ...
Parental incarceration and its reoccurring effects on children, specifically in the system, is a rising issue with little research done and no current solution to halt the snowballing problem. According to Cynthia Seymour (1998), “current estimates indicate that as many as 1.5 million children have an incarcerated parent; many thousands of others have experienced the incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives”. A large portion of our country is effected by incarceration, especially children, yet nothing is being done to support these children and their families or caretakers.
Sheldon, Sally. "Unwilling Fathers And Abortion: Terminating Men's Child Support Obligations?" Modern Law Review 66.2 (2003): 175-194.Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Mar. 2014.
Around the 1950’s, the media perpetuated the idea of the picturesque family unit; children made the shift from being a necessary evil to a symbol of status. Children were no longer meant to help sustain the family, so much as meant to be trophies of the parents’ competentness. Children became an outlet for parents to mold and live through vicariously: the more perfect your child was, the better parent you were. The problem is not that people want to have children, but that many cannot afford to take care of their spawn. Whether you are a young mother utilizing the assistance of government programs such as WIC or simply writing off your children on your taxes, you are making use of government incentive to procreate. Reproduction is completely natural; however, once backed by government incentive, the motivations for having children can take an unnatural turn. Children may be a symbol of love and unity, but it has expanded beyond the family unit. Many children have become the responsibility of the Unite...
With the increase of divorce and the number of children being born out of wedlock, parental alienation continues to grow. With custody laws changing, allowing for equal opportunities for both parents to raise their children, and fathers beginning to fight for their right to be involved, not just every other weekend fathers, custody battles have become increasingly fierce. Another factor contributing to this is the fact that many courts consider who will be more willing to encourage the child to have a heathly and continuing relationship with the other parent.
The website that contains the above sentence is a site that discusses stories about some men that do not believe they should pay child support. In some of the cases, the man is unaware that he was the biological father of the child, but was ordered by court to pay to help support the child. Other cases were about divorced couples where the man is upset about providing for the children after the separation even if they are his biological children. In the view of Daniel Callahan, the author of the article “Bioethics and Fatherhood”, this website is nonsense. He argues that, “given the obvious importance of procreation in bringing human life into existence, fathers have a significant moral responsibility for the children they voluntarily procreate”. In the situations where the biological fathers just don’t want to give up their money for the children, Callahan’s argument can be directly applied. For the other cases, the argument can still be used because those men had believed that they were the real fathers at first. The fact that they aren’t obligated to take on the responsibility of caring for that child, does not mean that all responsibility should be taken off the real biological father and put on the man that thought he was. The website, Women’s Health Care Services, also agrees with argument and says, “The father of a child has a legal responsibility to provide for the support, educational, medical and other needs of that child.” Therefore the dad should at least be there financially for their child.
The amount of child support cases in arrears would decline if a few things were changed, hopefully providing incentives to pay child support on time and regularly. There are also harsher consequences that could be carried out to prevent future mistakes. There are things being done, but is it enough? As it stands the noncustodial parent can face loss of visitation, probation, and even jail time for none payment of child support. By not enforcing court ordered child support and making examples out of those who are not in compliance, we are sending out a message that child support is more of an option than a legal obligation. Think about the ones who are really suffering here, the children involved.
...rtion should not be an option unless this endangers the health of the mother. Time and time again the mother uses not knowing who the father is as a way to eliminate complication. This makes it difficult for a law to really be effective if one was put in place. It is the mothers body and 9 months of her life but she has made this mistake and must live with it if the father is willing to take all rights and responsibilities of this child [Williams, 2013].
Mass incarceration in America has left millions of people without the means to survive. Former offenders are discharged from prison without any income. Many owing outstanding child support payments. Some will likely re-offend to pay their outstanding debt, while others will be subject to contempt of court for failure to pay outstanding support accrued during
In 2007, 52 percent of prisoners were parents in the United States which is a big number. A lot of people like to call the black men that have been incarcerated the missing fathers. Incarceration can lead to extreme financial distress for the entire family with harsh implications for children. So children with imprisoned parents also do worse in school an important indicator of economic mobility. I believe that it has become a cycle where if the children who become fatherless because they have no one too look up too. And most of the time the other parent is working alot to keep up with the finances. So usually the children have no one to look up too so must of the time children end up doing things that they know thats not safe. And sometimes the children end up going in to crime and going to jail. Sometimes when theres not a strong family home the children don't know what to do