One Responsibility, Different Barriers: Rethinking Accountability in Child Support

A recent commentary from the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), “Rich Dad, Poor Dad: The Two Worlds of Fatherhood Policy,” offers a useful challenge to the child support and fatherhood fields.

The article describes two very different policy worlds. In one, fathers—often those with greater economic resources—are encouraged to become more engaged caregivers and co-parents. In the other, lower-income fathers are more likely to encounter public systems through payment expectations, debt, compliance requirements, and enforcement.

That contrast deserves attention. We should be concerned when economic disadvantage changes not just a father’s resources, but the way public policy defines his role as a parent.

At the same time, the conversation should not end with a choice between enforcement and support—or between financial responsibility and parental engagement.

Children need both.

For us at the Center for Child Support Policy, the question is not whether parents should be held responsible for supporting their children. They should. The harder and more useful question is what kind of child support system is most likely to help parents actually fulfill that responsibility.

Presence and provision are not competing expectations

Child support exists for an important reason: children deserve financial support from both parents.

That expectation should not change based on a parent’s income, race, background, or circumstances.

But financial responsibility is only one dimension of parenting.

Parents also care for children, attend school events and medical appointments, provide transportation and emotional support, help with homework, make decisions, establish traditions, and build relationships that shape their children’s lives.

Public policy should not create a false choice between presence and provision.

Children need both.

The goal should not be to decide whether fathers are providers or caregivers. Fatherhood is broader than either role alone. It means fully embracing the responsibilities of parenthood—financial support, meaningful engagement, consistency, care, and accountability.

Public policy should help fathers succeed across that full range of responsibilities. That means expecting parents to contribute financially, encouraging meaningful involvement in their children’s lives, and providing support when barriers make it difficult for them to do either.

Presence and provision are both essential, but neither alone captures the full responsibility of being a parent.

That matters because parents do not come to the child support system with the same resources or the same ability to navigate it.

A parent with stable employment, savings, reliable transportation, predictable work hours, and access to legal help has a very different ability to recover from a financial setback than a parent whose work is intermittent, whose housing or transportation is unstable, or who has difficulty navigating the court or child support system.

The responsibility may be the same. The barriers are not.

Accountability should come with a realistic path to success

Child support policy can too easily treat an inability to pay as though it were an unwillingness to pay.

When a parent has the resources to support a child and deliberately avoids that responsibility, meaningful enforcement is appropriate.

But when a parent is willing to meet that responsibility and lacks the employment, skills, stability, or resources necessary to do so, enforcement alone does not necessarily produce a better outcome for the child.

An unpaid order does not create income. Growing debt does not create employment. A sanction does not necessarily resolve the barrier that prevented payment in the first place.

Holding parents responsible should also mean ensuring that the system gives them a realistic opportunity to succeed.

That principle has informed some of the most promising child support innovations.

Georgia’s Fatherhood and Parental Accountability Court initiative is one example. Its premise was not that parents should be excused from supporting their children. The expectation remained. But the response went beyond simply imposing consequences for nonpayment and focused on addressing barriers that prevented parents from fulfilling both their financial and parental responsibilities.

That is not less accountability. It is accountability with a pathway forward.

Employment support is child support policy

Employment and training services offer an especially clear example.

In December 2024, the federal government finalized a rule allowing state and Tribal child support agencies, at their option, to use federal child support funding for certain employment and training services for eligible noncustodial parents. The rule recognized that helping a parent obtain and maintain employment can supplement traditional enforcement tools and improve that parent’s ability to support a child.

That policy reflected a straightforward idea: connecting parents to employment is not separate from child support when employment is what makes payment possible.

The current administration has proposed rescinding that rule and eliminating federal financial participation for those services.

We believe that would be a step in the wrong direction.

The issue is not whether child support agencies should become workforce agencies. They should not. Nor does every parent who fails to pay need an employment program.

But when unstable or inadequate employment is the reason a parent cannot meet a child support obligation, taking away a tool designed to address that barrier makes little policy sense.

If the goal is reliable support for children, our response should not begin and end after a payment is missed. We should also be willing to invest in strategies that make future payment more likely.

Rescinding the employment and training option risks narrowing the child support program’s toolbox at precisely the point when the field should be getting better at distinguishing between parents who will notmeet their obligations and parents who cannot yet meet them.

Those situations call for different interventions.

Sometimes the right answer is enforcement. Sometimes it is employment assistance, an order modification, debt management, or connection to another resource.

A strong child support system should be capable of knowing the difference—and should have the tools to respond accordingly.

The same rules do not always create the same opportunity

Our systems can apply the same rules to everyone without being equally navigable by everyone.

Consider two parents who experience the same sudden loss of employment.

One has savings, reliable internet access, flexible time, transportation, and legal advice about how to seek a modification.

Another is living paycheck to paycheck, working irregular hours when work is available, lacks reliable transportation, and does not know that modification is possible or how to request one.

The legal responsibility has not changed. But the ability to respond to the system has.

That is why fairness cannot mean simply applying identical processes to everyone. We also must ask whether those processes give people a realistic opportunity to meet the expectations placed on them.

Economic disadvantage also intersects with race, geography, labor-market opportunities, justice-system involvement, access to legal assistance, disability, and family circumstances. Those factors can shape both the barriers parents encounter and how they experience public systems.

The answer is not to expect less from some parents. It is to build systems that allow more parents to succeed.

That also means looking critically at our own policies and practices.

Are orders based on what parents can realistically pay? Can parents obtain modifications when circumstances materially change? Are notices understandable? Do enforcement tools increase compliance—or can they sometimes interfere with employment, transportation, or stability in ways that make future payment less likely?

These questions do not weaken accountability. They make accountability more rigorous because they force us to ask whether our interventions are truly producing the result we want: more reliable support for children.

What are we ultimately trying to accomplish?

Child support programs have long measured success through paternity establishment, order establishment, current support collections, arrears collections, and cost effectiveness.

Those measures matter. But they do not tell us everything we should want to know.

We should also ask whether parents are becoming more economically stable, whether support is becoming more consistent over time, whether orders remain realistic as circumstances change, and whether families are receiving the support they need.

We should examine whether interventions are resolving the barriers that cause nonpayment and whether some families experience significantly greater difficulty navigating the system than others.

And we should ask a question that gets to the heart of the child support program’s mission:

Are we simply collecting support, or are we helping parents become better equipped to support their children?

The answer should be both.

A strong child support program establishes fair obligations and expects parents to meet them. It uses enforcement when parents have the ability to pay but choose not to. And when parents want to meet their responsibilities but face genuine barriers to doing so, it creates or connects them to a pathway that can help them succeed.

That is not less accountability. It is accountability designed to work.

Moving from two worlds toward one goal

The AIBM commentary is right to challenge a system in which some fathers are primarily encouraged to become better caregivers while others are primarily pressured to become better payers.

But the answer is not to replace one narrow definition of fatherhood with another.

We do not have to choose between presence and provision, or between accountability and support. And we should not assume that applying the same process or consequence to every parent gives every parent the same opportunity to succeed.

We can hold one clear expectation for every parent: fully embrace the responsibility of supporting your children. That responsibility includes financial provision. It also includes presence, engagement, care, and accountability.

The role of the child support system is not to define fatherhood around payment alone, nor to excuse financial responsibility in the name of engagement. It is to hold parents accountable while helping create the conditions in which they can meet the full range of responsibilities they have to their children.

That means expecting parents to support their children—and expecting the system to give them a realistic opportunity to succeed in doing so.

Ultimately, success should not be measured simply by whether the system imposed an obligation or enforced a consequence. It should be measured by whether more parents are able to fulfill their responsibilities—and whether more children receive the financial support, parental engagement, and stability they need to thrive.