Making Fathers Pay

A couple with children divorce. A court orders the father to pay child support, but the father fails to pay. This pattern repeats itself thousands of times every year in nearly every American state. Making Fathers Pay is David L. Chambers's study of the child-support collection process in Michigan, the state most successful in inducing fathers to pay. He begins by reporting the perilous financial problems of divorced mothers with children, problems faced even by mothers who work full time and receive child support. The study then examines the characteristics of fathers who do and do not pay support and the characteristics of collections systems that work. Chambers's findings are based largely on records of fathers' support payments in twenty-eight Michigan counties, some of which jail hundreds of men for nonpayment every year. Chambers finds that in places well organized to collect support, jailing nonpayers seems to produce higher payments from men jailed and from men not jailed, but only at a high social cost. He also raises grave doubts about the fairness of the judicial process that leads to jail. While Chambers's total sample includes 12,000 men, he interweaves through his text moving interviews with members of one family caught in the painful predicaments that men, women, and children face upon separation. To increase support for children at lower social costs, Chambers advocates a national system of compulsory deductions from the wages of non-custodial parents who earn more than enough for their own subsistence.

How to track, find, and collect from a deadbeat dad.

“Like the YouTube channel, this is a touching yet informative guide for those seeking fatherly advice, or even a few good dad jokes.” — Library Journal

Millions of families strive to give their children the best possible upbringing after being split apart by divorce. Separated mothers and fathers -- and in many cases their second spouses -- struggle to find the right way to piece together parent-child relationships in its wake. In this revolutionary work, psychologist Sanford L. Braver -- who undertook the largest ever federally funded study on issues confronting divorced fathers -- shows how millions of well-intentioned mothers, fathers, judges, lawyers, educators, and other caregivers have been repeatedly and tragically misled by the prevailing data about divorce and parenthood.For years our society has accepted the image of the "dead-beat dad" who shirks childcare payments and other responsibilities. Yet Braver proves that this villainous figure -- like many other myths of the divorced parent -- simply does not exist in significant numbers. Moreover, Braver overturns one of the most important pieces of data on divorce in the past quarter-century: the belief that divorced women suffer a steep decline in their standard of living. This widely embraced notion was the result of misread data, but was transformed into "fact" by the media and the courts, and accepted by divorced families and their advocates.No other book has revealed the deep flaws in today's research on divorce. One-sided studies of divorced men and women, misused census data, and poor research have skewed many of the assumptions around which parents and courts have shaped divorce settlements, parenting responsibilities, and child-rearing decisions. Every divorced parent -- and anyone who loves a divorced parent -- urgently needs this book to understand the newrealities behind divorce and parenting. Notes. Index.

This new edition of a classic feminist book explains how one of the great historical revolutions - the ongoing movement toward equality between the sexes - has come about. Its origins are to be found, not in changing ideas, but in the economic developments that have made women's labour too valuable to be spent exclusively in domestic pursuits. The revolution is unfinished; new arrangements are needed to fight still-prevalent discrimination in the workplace, to achieve a more just sharing of housework and childcare between women and men, and, with the weakening of the institution of marriage, to re-erect a firm economic basis for the raising of children.