158 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
bills for these moms when dad didn’t pay his child support. To no
one’s surprise, they found that it was our government, its welfare
department, and in short—the taxpayers, who were in fact paying
for all of these nonsupported families. So President Ron and his
boys got quite hard line on the child support issue. In the mid-
1980s they got nationwide legislation passed that required the
enactment of mandatory child-support guidelines (including, but
not limited to, its calculation, assessment, collection, and enforce-
ment) in every state of the country.
We still have a lot further to go. A report issued by the U.S.
Commission on Interstate Child Support compared America’s
state-based system of collecting child support to a “cumber-
some, slow moving dinosaur” and made the following findings:
(1) today, millions of children in the United States fail to receive
the financial support they are owed; (2) one in four American chil-
dren grows up in a single-parent household; (3) children whose
parents live in different states suffer the most; (4) each year the
system fails to collect about one-third of the approximately $15
billion ordered or promised for some eleven million children.
The bottom line result of all this is that noncustodial parents
now generally have to pay a significantly higher level of child
support based on the computerized guideline formula. In Hawai‘i
and many other states, this formula centers on the gross incomes
(not the net) of the two parties, the number of kids to be sup-
ported, who is assuming the medical and childcare costs, whether
any alimony is being paid, and a number of other factors. Much
to the dismay of payor spouses, the child-support guidelines do
not focus very extensively upon the other preexisting debt or
payment obligations of the payor. The rationale is that the needs
of the children come first.
One unsettling trend that I have observed in this custody/child-
support context is that because higher child-support awards are
becoming common, and since the level of child support owed to
a sole physical custodial parent is often much higher (frequently
double!) than the amounts awarded in joint physical custody cases,
some spouses seek sole custody strictly to gain that extra money in
child support. The flip side is that some less-than-committed par-
ents may seek joint custody strictly to lower their child-support