Policy & Practice | Winter 2024

aphsa insights

By Jess Maneely and Khristian Monterroso

A Whole-Family Approach to Child Support in Federal Policymaking

C hild support collections—totaling $29.6 billion for 12.7 million children in FY 2023 1 —represent one of the largest cash transfers in the country and are a critical financial investment in the stability and well being of families. In recent years, local, state, and federal child support offices started reexamining how their enforcement and collection roles can be paired with services that foster meaningful parental engagement and invest in the social and economic well being of parents paying child support. This shift represents a movement toward a more holistic approach to supporting families for the long term. It offers the promise of a child support system operating in alignment with the broader human services ecosystem. In examining child support services, it is important to understand the reach they have throughout federal benefits. Across the continuum of human services programs, rules related to child support can impact whether someone qualifies for benefits, what amount they can receive, or what child support they owe. This is true for programs ranging from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, child care, child welfare, and more. Often, federal laws and state policy options regarding child support prac tices are made by individual programs in distinct silos from each other, resulting in disjointed and misaligned rules that work at odds with each other in driving positive outcomes for families involved in child support services.

Starting in 2022, the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) in partnership with the National Child Support Engagement Association (NCSEA) and the National Council of Child Support Directors (NCCSD) launched forums for intentional dialogue among administrators of economic support programs, inclusive of child support programs, to spark collaborative relationships across programs and explore policy and practice levers that impact shared participants. Building on the momentum of these forums, the group invited national partners and parents with lived experience receiving and/or paying child support

to co-design a framework. Through these iterative discussions, the cross sectional collaborators established a set of four foundational tenets 2 for promoting an aligned, whole family approach to economic supports, inclu sive of child support. While state and local human services agencies have made impor tant strides advancing these tenets in the last two years, it has become clear that to achieve systems-level reform, agencies will need to navigate around long-standing federal policies that impede alignment. Drawing on the insights of collaborations to date, we highlight several of the highest impact federal policy strategies. These

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Policy & Practice Winter 2024