Section 1.10: Child Support (Advanced Maintenance)
| The Benefit. Cash support of a child by a non-custodial parent. In some countries there are public guarantees of a specific level of payment, variously known as "Advanced Maintenance" or " Child Support Assurance." The payment may be made by a government agency and then collected from the parent. |
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| Purpose: To assure children of the financial support of their biological parents, whether or not they are living together; to protect such children who are likely to be particularly disadvantaged economically when living with a lone mother. |
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| History: In instances of parental separation, divorce, desertion, or non-residence in the same household at any time, a non-custodial parent might voluntarily provide financial support for his/her child. In more recent years, public authorities may mandate a level of regular contributions to child support by the non-custodial parent. In some countries, administrative agencies or courts assist in collection if the non-custodial parent does not pay the support or pays irregularly or inadequately and may impose various sanctions upon non-payment. These programs are usually coordinated with paternity identification programs. |
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| Benefit Level and Duration: The benefit level and duration vary significantly across countries and often vary within countries as well. A current trend is to set support as a portion of the non-custodial parent's income. |
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| Country Profiles Because no international bodies regularly report standardized child support information, we are here limited to eight country sketches from a U.K. study.
Table 1.109 Availability of Advanced Maintenance Programs in Select Countries See country specific profiles under the Countries section for description of child support systems in other countries. |
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ReferencesHelen Barnes, Patricia Day, and Natalie Cronin, Trial and Error: A Review of U.K. Child Support Policy (London: Family Policy Studies Policy, Occasional Paper No.24, 1998), "Ch.4, Overseas Experiences of Child Support Policy," pp. 35-63. See the article by Jonathan Bradshaw and Christine Skinner entitled "Child support: The British fiasco" in the Spring 2000 issue of Focus at the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Alfred J. Kahn and Sheila B. Kamerman, eds., Child Support: From Debt Collection to Social Policy (Newbury Park, CA., 1998). James Kunz, Patrick Villeneuve, Irwin Garfinkel, "Child Support Among Selected OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis," in Koen Vlemincx and Timothy Sneeding, Child Well-Being, Child Poverty, and Child Policy in Modern Nations (Bristol, Eng.: Policy Press, 2000, forthcoming). |
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| Last updated November 2004 |
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