By Taylor Jones
Associate Editor, Vol 24
In America, estimates show that six percent of all children and twelve percent of black children will have been placed in foster care by the age of eighteen.[1] As a result of interactions with Child Protective Services, on any given day there are roughly 438,000 children in foster care.[2] When children are taken from their families and placed in the foster system, the parents are charged child support, to be paid to the state. Child support is frequently imposed on families because of the belief that parents should remain responsible for the financial well-being of their children.[3] Although intended to provide for the needs of children in foster care, child support, when imposed on families without sufficient funds, can have a number of negative collateral consequences. One such consequence includes an interference with the return of children to their families based on an inability to pay child support to the state. Child support is imposed on families as a type of cost recovery scheme. The individual child or children involved do not receive money directly from their parents. Instead, child support is collected from parents with children in the foster system in order to reimburse or offset the government’s costs for providing foster care services.[4] The funds collected are meant to serve as revenues for states with limited resources. While the cost of child support varies among states, it does not typically track the child’s actual costs while in foster care. Instead, the amount is typically generated based on the income of the parent or parents. Thus, a parent could be paying more money to the state than their child is spending while in foster care. Such a discrepancy does not raise many eyebrows likely because of the widely held belief and assumption that parents should be responsible for the financial care of their children, especially when the parents are not providing custodial care.
