Child support is a legal obligation that a parent must pay to help another parent provide for the reasonable and necessary physical, emotional, and financial needs of a child.
It is important to remember that the amount of child support owed will depend on the net income of both parents. Generally, the more net income one parent has, the more he or she will have to pay in child support.
Custodial Parent
A parent who has sole physical custody (the most time with the child) is considered a custodial parent. This is different than joint physical custody, where each parent has some physical custody with the child, but the custodial parent has legal custody.
The custodial parent may also have shared physical custody with the noncustodial parent, but this is not the same thing as sole or primary physical custody. Shared physical custody means that both parents share the decision-making responsibilities of raising the child. This includes major decisions such as what religion they should attend, medical care, discipline, and education. The Internal Revenue Service considers a child to be a dependent when he or she lives primarily with one parent, and the other parent cannot claim the child on their annual tax returns.
Even with shared physical custody, the parent who has physical custody of a child is still responsible for paying child support. This money is used to cover the basic needs of the child such as food, clothing and shelter.
Many families have informal child support arrangements outside of formal child support orders. These informal arrangements can be beneficial to both the custodial and non-custodial parents.
These arrangements can help to reduce costs and improve stability for the non-custodial parent while maintaining a consistent level of contact with the child. They can also allow the non-custodial parent to provide for their children on an as-needed basis.
In these cases, a mandatory cooperation requirement would be inappropriate since the obligation to pay child support is not something that a non-custodial parent can afford or even have already provided. This is particularly true for low-income families and those with unstable jobs.
Mandatory cooperation would also have a negative impact on the health of children in these families, as it could restrict a non-custodial parent’s access to needed benefits. These benefits include SNAP, which provides food assistance to low-income households.
When a court orders a non-custodial parent to pay child support, the court can set a cap on their income. This cap is determined by a number of factors, including whether or not the child’s needs are being met, the amount of debt the non-custodial parent has to pay, and other financial circumstances.
A cap is only a guideline and can be adjusted if the court finds that it’s in the child’s best interest to do so. This is why courts often award child support above the $163,000 income cap.
In addition, states often have more direct enforcement levers to target bad actors who refuse to cooperate, such as garnishment of wages or seizure of assets. If a non-custodial parent is receiving food assistance, cutting their benefits will severely reduce their ability to provide any support.
Nevertheless, if the non-custodial parent has a child living with them and that child is eligible for SNAP benefits, they can claim the child as a dependent in order to qualify for the deduction or exclusion of child support payments. In 2018, SNAP beneficiaries that claimed this benefit received an additional $19.2 million in monthly benefits than those who did not claim it.
