Ford and Child Support

Featured

May 2

On January 4, 1975, US President Gerald Ford signed into law a section of the Social Security Act that established a national child support collection system. For a number of reasons, he did so with mixed feelings. For one thing, Ford himself had experienced the travails of divorce and a father who failed to keep up with child support payments. Secondly, he harbored real reservations about getting the federal government so involved in domestic issues. Finally, he could foresee problems in a program that would soon label many dads “deadbeats.”

Ford himself was the product of divorce. His biological father, Leslie King Sr., after whom Ford was named at birth, was the son of a prosperous Omaha businessman. The brother of a college roommate of Ford’s mother, Dorothy Gardner, King struck a dashing figure and soon won her heart. Yet it was not long after their 1912 marriage that hopes for marital bliss were dashed. King turned out to be a jealous, alcoholic, and abusive husband. Less than three weeks after Leslie King Jr.’s birth, his mother fled the state and returned to sanctuary with her family.

Later that year, the elder King sued his wife for divorce, alleging desertion. She countersued and ultimately prevailed, in part because police officers had witnessed King threatening his wife and child with a knife. King was ordered to pay child support, yet never did so. Instead, his wealthy father, the boy’s grandfather, did so for as long as he lived. Dorothy could never bear to call her son by his father’s name, so he grew up being called Junior, or Junie for short. Ford did not know that the man his mother later married, a Grand Rapids businessman named Gerald Ford, was not his father until he reached high school.

When Ford signed the child support amendments to the Social Security Act, he did so in strong agreement with its objective to ensure that children affected by divorce would not fall into poverty. Yet as he later indicated, he was also concerned that the provisions of the law would “inject the federal government too deeply into domestic relations and raise serious privacy and administrative issues.” For example, tax collection procedures of the Internal Revenue Service would be used, and a parent locator service would be established that would have access to all federal records.

Back in 1975, it was routine in divorce cases for custody to be granted to the mother and for the father to be required to finance the raising of the child. When a marriage ended, the mother’s financial status usually declined considerably, while the father’s typically improved. The law was founded on the goal that the family should be restored as closely as possible to its condition before the divorce. Because most mothers were homemakers and most fathers breadwinners, it seemed to make sense for the non-custodial parent to pay the bills.

As the decades passed, however, more and more children were born out of wedlock, now accounting for about 4 in 10 of all births. In these cases, children were no longer born into a traditional family where the mother was a homemaker and the father the breadwinner. In many cases, they had never even lived together or did so for only a short period of time, and the father might never have supported the mother. So the idea of restoring the family as closely as possible to its state before the divorce gradually became less relevant, at least when it comes to the welfare of children.

In principle, it makes sense that dads should bear some responsibility for their children, and for years those who were not involved in providing support were labeled deadbeats. In Clinton-era reforms, states were required to make child support guidelines clear and enforce them or be subjected to penalties. In many cases, mothers who were receiving public assistance basically had no choice but to seek child support from fathers. In some states, even fathers with no income could be subject to a child support order based on the assumption that they were working full-time at minimum wage.

Further complicating matters was the fact that some fathers did not know that they had a child, and others did not find out about it until months or even years after the child was born. In such cases, fathers could be required not only to start paying child support but to pay retroactively for the time that had elapsed since birth. Many low-income and no-income fathers found themselves in debt so deep they had no hope of ever climbing out. States could require fathers to pay, but merely saying so did not mean they would be able to do it.

One consequence was that many fathers ended up even less involved in the lives of their children, only distancing themselves further from their child’s mother and the children themselves. Calling such fathers deadbeats did nothing to enhance their ability to pay and only alienated them from those for whom the system intended them to care. And even if they attempted to remain involved, the financial shortfall typically only undermined the relationship between mother and father, making it even more difficult for fathers to act as co-parents.

In some cases, fathers were even incarcerated, making it essentially impossible for them to meet their child support requirements. Yet the liability continued to accrue each month, often saddling them with debts on release totaling many thousands of dollars. Should the father have entered the labor market, his wages would have been garnished, decreasing the incentive for him to work, often to the point that he remained unemployed or even engaged in illicit activities to earn money. When this happened, his probability of ending up back in prison increased substantially.

An effort to get tough on deadbeat dads from the 1980s automatically triggered a lien on the property of anyone in arears on child support payments. Such a lien never expired, was not affected by any statute of limitations, did not permit any judicial discretion, even in situations such as bankruptcy, and could not be modified based on the father’s ability to work, including physical disability. Such efforts, though well-intentioned, often placed fathers already in a rather bleak situation in one they quickly came to regard as hopeless.

In short, the typical conditions on which the federal child support law that President Ford signed in 1975 was based, and which were subsequently modified during the Clinton administration, have changed dramatically. In some cases, a system designed to ensure accountability and protect the interests of children has only exacerbated underlying problems. For example, some states have suspended the driver’s licenses of those who owe child support, but the result has only been to make it more difficult for them to earn money to make payments.

President Ford was right to express mixed feelings about the federal government’s role in child support. While it has helped in some ways to protect the interests of the children, it has also resulted in unintended and even unforeseen and perverse consequences that have not served the best interests of families. By virtue of his own life experience, Ford knew far better than most what it is like to be the child of divorced parents, one of whom ignores his parental responsibilities, but he also understood the dangers of drafting sweeping laws to address widely differing and quickly evolving family circumstances.

Photo courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum. Gerald R. Ford, Jr. poses with his father and half-brothers Tom, Dick, and Jim Ford on the front steps of 649 Union Street, SE, Grand Rapids, MI. October 1927.