Who Should Support Your Child?

It should be self-evident that both parents will contribute towards the upkeep of their children. Both parents contributed equally to the child being born and children should not live in poverty or miss out on the things that their friends have just because their parents don’t live together. Even when there is a step-parent on the scene, that doesn’t mean that both parents shouldn't still take responsibility for the child’s upkeep.

All children need shelter, food, heating, clothing and shoes as well as to be able to go on those school trips or to after school clubs with their friends. With about £4 billion owing in child maintenance in 2017, how many children will not reach their full potential either academically or physically because the resident parent can’t afford the things they need? Are we missing out on great scientists or great athletes because of the poverty these children are suffering as the non-resident parent refuses to pay?

The majority of single parents are the mothers as fathers are much more able to walk away without looking back. As a single parent, it is very difficult to find affordable child care so this makes it much more difficult to work and also much more difficult to get a job at the salary that they could earn if they didn’t have children.

There are a number of ways that a parent can avoid paying child support.

1. They could go through the courts and get custody of the children. There is a general belief that if a mother loses custody there must be some reason why, she must be an unfit mother. However, this is unlikely to be the case. It could be that she and the children suffered domestic violence and she wanted protect the children and herself from the father. If she seems “hostile” to the father and wanted to limit or deny contact, then the courts will blame her as there is a presumption that it is in the child’s “best interest” to have a relationship with both parents even when the father is violent or abusive. Fathers often use the debunked theory of Parental Alienation Syndrome or possible Future Emotional Abuse of the child to get residence transferred to them. If they have residency, they don’t have to pay child support and, even better, they can now claim Child Support from the mother!
2. Parents could lie about their income, although this is difficult as the CSA check with HMRC about how much the parent or their employer has declared.
3. The non-resident parent can lose their job and start to claim benefits. This means that they don’t pay a percentage of their wages but just £7 a week out of their benefits so the tax payer is paying the child support.
4. A great way of avoiding child support is to become “self-employed”. Add to this getting paid cash-in-hand which isn’t reported to HMRC and a good accountant who can ensure that that they don’t make a profit, then no child support is payable. There are also ways of being paid which involve shares and assets which aren’t taken into account.

The non-residents parent’s lifestyle isn’t looked into, so expensive cars and fancy holidays aren’t used as an indication of how much they are earning and how much child support should be paid. The resident parent can only sit by and watch as the non-resident parent lives a sumptuous lifestyle and their child misses out on the basics.

Child maintenance is worked out as a percentage of the non-resident parent’s annual income less a few things, like other children they pay maintenance for or pension payments. It is also dependant on how many nights the child stays with the non-resident parent, so the more contact they have the less they pay. This means that 50/50 shared parenting could mean that they don’t have to pay anything.

In my opinion, the following changes should be made to ensure that all children receive the child support they need to grow up without suffering the deprivations of poverty and that all parents are responsible for them financially.

1. There should be a minimum weekly presumed maintenance payment of £50 per week per child, rising annually with inflation. Only in very exceptional circumstances where the non-resident parent has an extremely good reason for not being able to afford this, for example, they are dead, dying or have a long term illness that prevents them from working, should this amount be reduced. This would mean that is would not be worthwhile for a parent to deliberately lose their job or go “self-employed” as it should be assumed that they are capable of being employed and earning enough to support their children.
2. The problem with this would be that more fathers would attempt to get residency and shared parenting. There would be more mothers who would be deemed “hostile” or “unfit” to care for the child. Father’s Rights groups would press even more for shared parenting. Therefore, the Family Courts should look more carefully at cases where the father is claiming that the mother is alienating the child against them or where the mother is claiming domestic abuse, so that residency isn’t transferred to fathers where the mother has always been the primary care-giver and the child has a strong attachment to her. Family Courts need to be aware and act on these so called “high conflict cases” which are more often than not domestic abuse cases. That is not to say that the father isn’t the better parent if the mother is an alcoholic or drug dealer or is in another domestic abuse relationship with her new partner.

Children should be listened to in Family Courts and their wishes and feelings should be paramount. Children are very difficult to “alienate” from good fathers, it is much more likely that the father will alienate their children by their abusive behaviour.

A thorough understanding of domestic abuse and its continuation after the separation of the parents is essential to ensure that all children can grow up happy healthy, without fear and out of poverty.

Disclaimer – whilst much of this article has focused on abusive fathers, it must be pointed out that the many fathers pay their child support without recourse to Child Support Services and play active, useful roles in their children’s lives and support the mothers of their children well.