Child Support: How Much Is Just Right?

The provision of financial support for children when their parents divorce is a highly contentious and complicated problem. This chapter challenges the conventional policy used to generate child support guidelines. Offering a superior alternative to child support, it designs a set of guidelines that rest on a principled and systematic method which incorporates the three distinct purposes of support orders: to protect the well-being of the child, to enforce the normative understanding that both parents have a support obligation, and to limit the disparity that might otherwise rise between the child's living standard and the higher living standard of the non-custodial household. The principles underlying this policy approach not only generate guidelines that weigh the basic considerations for a fair and decent arrangement, they also address the thorny issues that arise from the increasing situation of blended families which contain both child support obligors and recipients.