“A Helping Hand over a Heavy Hand”: Child Support Enforcement in the Era of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic forced human services agencies to adapt quickly to the economic realities faced by their customers. For child support agencies, the pandemic raised difficult questions about how strenuously agencies should enforce child support orders during periods of economic crisis and uncertainty. Drawing on interviews with agency and court staff, this study explores staff’s perceptions of pandemic-related effects on parents’ abilities to work and pay, how and why enforcement practices changed during the pandemic, and changes staff expect to persist. Agency staff reported a pause on enforcement at the pandemic’s outset, followed by leniency, flexibility, caution, and empathy in their practices.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• child support enforcement
• human services

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Interviews included questions about the use of and processes related to criminal nonsupport charges; however, those findings are omitted as the current analysis focuses on actions specifically taken to compel compliance, and criminal nonsupport is a punitive action that cannot be cleared by coming into compliance (Cook & Noyes, 2011; Gentry, 2017). Broadly, agency staff reported few changes to criminal nonsupport in the pandemic context, and very limited use prior to or during the COVID-19 pandemic.

² Whereas most findings presented in this paper draw on information shared by court staff and support agency staff, court staff were not asked questions about administrative enforcement, given that these actions fall under the domain of the child support agency. Therefore, findings on administrative enforcement are based nearly entirely on information from agency directors and staff (whereas all other findings reflect information from both groups).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Child Support Research Agreement between the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin– Madison.