Child Support and Shared Parenting Report Card
National Parents Organization’s primary focus is on promoting shared parenting so that children aren’t deprived of a full relationship with both of their loving and fit parents because of divorce or parental separation. To that end, NPO works for changes in state laws and court rules to promote equal shared parenting when parents are living apart and to educate parents, legislators, and divorce professionals about the benefits of equal shared parenting. Our focus is child well-being.
Child support laws, policies, and practices were, no doubt, established with the objective of promoting children’s well-being, too. Unfortunately, despite being created with good intentions, many child support laws, policies, and practices are detrimental to children. Because they are based on the outdated sole-custodial/visitor model of separated parenting, they create significant barriers to shared parenting. Instead of encouraging parents to share equally in raising their children, they create incentives for parental conflict.
In the first of its kind study, NPO has examined in detail the child support guidelines of each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, grading them on the degree to which they encourage or discourage shared parenting. In particular, the 2022 NPO Child Support and Shared Parenting Report Card evaluates the states on their parenting time adjustment (PTA), sometimes called a ‘parenting time offset’ or a ‘residential time credit’. This is a mechanism by which child support guidelines allocate resources for rearing children between the children’s two homes.
The results are shocking! Nine states have no PTA at all. This means that a payer parent with whom the children reside half the time, or even more, will presumptively pay the same amount of child support to the other parent as one with whom the children spend no time at all. And many states that have a PTA impose unreasonable thresholds on its application—some don’t apply until the payer parent has the children in their care 50% of the time. These thresholds create cliff effects that engender parental conflict by treating insignificant differences in parenting time very differently for calculating child support. Some state guidelines with low thresholds create cliff effects elsewhere in their calculations, again encouraging parental conflict instead of cooperation.
With NPO’s interactive map, you can see what grade your state received in this study, the basis for that grade, and what your state can do to establish child support guidelines that truly promote children’s best interest by encouraging equal shared parenting when parents live apart.
In addition to the main report, NPO has published a Technical Supplement, with a detailed description of the methodology and formal analysis undertaken in support of the main report.
In this study, NPO found that:
4 states received ‘A’s
8 states received ‘B’s
6 states received ‘C’s
11 states received ‘D’s
22 states received ‘F’s with nine of those scoring ‘0’s