The Support of Children

Since public assistance status is often used by politicians to define a family as "failed," welfare policy, when it focuses on ways to move clients off welfare or to blur the distinction between welfare and nonwelfare status, takes on a family policy cast. If relief clients can be restored to self-sufficiency or if their dependency status can be obscured, government no longer plays a special role in regard to these families as opposed to families generally. Eliminating government intervention in the affairs of dependent families can come about then either from shoring up a family's ability to make its own way or from substituting a routine benefit for a discretionary one. (Universal, free child care, for example, might substitute for discretionary day-care support, and thereby end the dependency of some low-income parents.) The objective common to both approaches is to avoid having a family labeled as inadequate or failed, but the approaches differ according to the disposition of the policymaker to resist or just to obscure the idea of prolonged dependency. The former disposition leads to an emphasis on self-help, the latter to an emphasis on universal benefits.

In the United States, policy tilts toward self-help and away from universal benefits.

If there were no indigent families, or at least no indigent families dependent on public assistance, a large part of the interest in family policy would disappear. This is not to say that the problems of troubled families whose troubles are basically noneconomic cannot independently command public policy attention. It does suggest that the appellation family policy is a convenient handle for attending to two expensive public problems: families dependent on public assistance and families that invite public intervention by such indicators of dysfunction (not necessarily accompanied by public assistance status) as abusive behavior, adolescent pregnancy, and child neglect. In urging the development of a body of family policy for the United States, proponents inevitably depend for their rationale on one or both of these issues of inadequate income and dysfunctional behavior. This chapter considers the status of public policy on some matters of special importance to low-income families with children: child care, public relief, and child support enforcement.