Child Support Myths Exposed: The Deadbeat Dads
There are some stories common to American culture that have known roots in real events or people. The Robber Barons. The hippies. The Lone Ranger. But then there are other ideas equally common to American culture that are just stories we tell each other. Some have absolutely no basis in reality, like the ‘razor blades in apples’ story. Some are wild distortions of the truth, like alligators in the sewers (the originals were found in the front yard of a family recently in from Florida).
Others are stories based on a single individual, but treated as though thousands of examples can be found everywhere you look. The ‘welfare queen,’ for example, doesn’t actually exist — except in the form of a single insanely criminal woman best known as Linda Taylor. No academic or government studies have ever found a meaningful number of people who meet the definition of a ‘welfare queen’ as given in the media. In a similar situation are ‘deadbeat dads.’
Yes, it’s true: despite what you may have heard on the news or in the op-ed column, there is no significant number of dads that choose to walk away from their children and shirk their duties as a parent.
Now, this is not the same thing as saying that there aren’t dads who do end up living apart from their children, and who do end up unable to meet mandate child support payment requirements. But being unable and being unwilling are two very different things: universally, the sociologists, criminologists, and government bureaucrats who have studied the issue have found that dads want to be present, and they want to support their children. They’re left unable to do so because of a variety of systemic barriers.
Ironically, one of the biggest barriers to fathers who want to be financially supportive of their children is the child-support system itself. It’s all-too-common to see a father who can’t make his child support payments because he lost his job…because he missed a child support payment, and his wages were garnished, so he couldn’t afford gas, and he got fired. Those aren’t ‘deadbeat’ dads — they’re ‘beaten-down’ dads. The system shouldn’t be designed to punish people because they had an unavoidable expense or a stroke of bad luck, but it does, and we perpetuate a dangerous and misguided myth when we think of those men as ‘deadbeat dads.’
If instead we recognize that almost every father that has studies has seen in real-life circumstances genuinely wants to be a part of their child’s life, but many can’t, we can start to get to the bottom of why.
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