The child support program was developed in 1975 to reimburse benefits paid by the government welfare programs. In 1996, Congress changed the program to increase the use of technology and “ensure children receive more of the support paid by their parents.” Read more here.
The United States Department of Health and Welfare, through its National Office of Child Support Enforcement, guides states and tribes in developing, managing and operating effective child support programs in keeping with federal laws. Child support programs operated by states and tribes are available to all who need them in addressing the basic needs of children. Basic needs are shelter, food, child care, transportation, and school clothes. Each state and tribe operating a child support program has the additional responsibility to ensure health care coverage for children in each state’s health and welfare department’s case load.
By federal law, each state and tribe that offers any kind of health and welfare program must create a system to calculate the amount of a family’s resources that should be allocated to cover children’s basic needs. Each state determines an average base value for meeting a child’s basic needs in that state. This amount is then used in designing each state’s child support system to create a set of calculations, based upon both parents’ incomes, that work together to allot monies for the basic needs of children born to those parents.
Each state adds their own unique factors, sometimes determined by counties or smaller jurisdictions within each state. The calculations designed by state laws may include things like deductions for work-related child care, health insurance premiums paid by one or both parents, cost of living allowances, travel for one or both parents to have visitation, and costs of additional children and spouses of each parent. Once a state designs its system for calculating child support, it must meet federal guidelines and include clauses to allow the courts to enforce child support. Thus, child support is a calculation based on specific systems and rules created within each state and complying with federal guidelines.
The enforcement of child support is monitored by the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA). This act was created to allow for an individual state to become a child’s home state so that parents cannot file for benefits in more than one state. The home state is defined as the state where the child has lived with a parent for six consecutive months prior to either parent filing for custody or for benefits (or since birth for children younger than six months).
