Family law principles and practice

Child Support

The complex dynamics of any individual family creates certain problems for legislative processes and all-encompassing rules. The relative factors that determine any single individual's family status is often outside of that individual's control and presents multiple avenues of responsibility, and at the same time creating multiple avenues of means of success. Unfortunately, marriage in today's society is consistently threatened by the complex and varying forces that influence relationships. In some instances where marriages produce children, outside powers step in to ensure that equal protection is guaranteed for all involved in this problem. The purpose of this essay is to examine certain situations where child support obligations are in question. I'll examine the biological, legal and socioeconomic relationships that help contribute to determining what fairness is in terms of child support payments.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, "in the spring of 2000, an estimated 13.5 million parents had custody of 21.7 million children under 21 years of age whose other parent lives somewhere else." The magnitude of this problem is expressly noted in these figures. The idea of custody and what determines what a parent is appears mostly vague and indeterminable. New attitudes on what constitutes a family in today's world has helped muddy the situation as well. Science and technology has allowed for unconventional methods of impregnation while it appears that the ethical debate surrounding this technology has lagged significantly behind this apparent practicality. Before determining who is responsible for a child it must be understood that a new approach seems to be needed in this particular debate.

Biologically, women do not need men to reproduce the species due to advancements in vitro fertilization and other techniques. This new idea of what constitutes a family causes many problems when children become involved. Parenting is the responsibility of more than just the biological mother or father, but the responsibility often falls in the lap of those adults who are closest to the child. Addressing this attitude from the inside out, suggesting that parenting is a skill that all citizens should possess in one form or the other would help alleviate some of the stresses that family and marriage laws create with in this environment often distorting the truth and creating more problems than solutions.

Meyer et al. (2005) investigation determined that marriage was a significant factor in ensuring a child had a suitable environment to prosper. But in terms of multiple partner relationships, these types of incidents " require each spouse to negotiate complex relationships between one another's former partners if relationships between nonresident parents and their children are to be preserved "(p.599). Here we see this idea of community and sharing responsibility for the child regardless of current marital status contributed to successful child support methods and eliminating costly investigations and court hearings.

Besides the moral and ethical problems of child support complexities, determining what ensures successful child payments after court rulings have been handed down suggest new problems help contribute to the overall detriment of the system. Case et al. (2003) noted that in their findings" three child support policies, genetic testing, legislative guidelines, and universal wage withholding are important determinants of child support payments." Genetic testing seems to be an overall inefficient and costly method of ensuring proper and universal fairness of child support payments. While in some cases this idea of assigning genetic responsibility to the child should equal monetary assistance this does not always apply and should be used sparingly especially understanding the fallibility of certain scientific procedures.

Legislative attempts at wage withholdings and other coercive measures, while seemingly done in the child's best interest, usually has the opposite effect. Raising a child should not be punished, it should be a reward. Any concept of life and growth most likely needs to be understood in order for this problem to be solved. Here again, a collective effort in raising children seems to be more effective when those in the closest proximity with the most available resources have the opportunity to help a child, than that should be the parent of the moment. Collective responsibility for today's youth is necessary to address this problem in its totality. Understanding and enforcing minute details of certain legislative processes and punishable acts of noncompliance does not effectively address the problem at its root cause and only serves to distort the symptoms into a greater problem of misunderstanding, mistrust and unnecessary suffering.