This Year, Celebrate Child Support Awareness Month by Listening
People who work in child support know how these meetings go.
The boss asks, “What are we going to do in August for Child Support Awareness Month?” And people start pitching ideas for backpacks filled with school supplies, book drives, fatherhood programs, and special outreach activities, with a press release or, better still, proclamation thrown in to give the boss’s boss something to do. (“Look—a squirrel!” is an under-rated tool for managing upward.)
I’ve been in those meetings and either offered those same ideas or cheered them on. And maybe next year or the year after that, I would cheer them on again.
But for the moment I want to offer my unsolicited contribution to the grand virtual meeting about Child Support Awareness Month: this year put some of your celebratory energy into sharpening your own awareness of how people understand the program.
“I want to offer my unsolicited contribution to the grand virtual meeting about Child Support Awareness Month: this year put some of your celebratory energy into sharpening your own awareness of how people understand the program.”
Do as We Say
I’m not saying child support programs should suddenly drop their plans.
After all, many of the children served by the child support program need backpacks, school supplies, and books, just as fathers, mothers, and children can benefit when fathers have strong, formalized support networks. These activities also help remind people who work in the program why we do it: to get children more of what they need to thrive.
But much of what we do to celebrate Child Support Awareness Month shares a common quality: it has nothing to do with child support.
My sense is that most of what we talk about in August emphasizes parts of the program that take up only a tiny fraction of the typical program’s budget or staff time. Worse, at least some of these Child Support Awareness Month activities come with a dash of irony: the backpacks, school supplies, and books that we give away for children would not, in almost all cases, be accepted as child support if a parent gave them to their own child.
We give your child a backpack: Yay for us!
You give your child a backpack: Where’s the money?
Don’t Mention the War
As child support professionals, we should ask ourselves why we often spend Child Support Awareness Month talking about almost anything but the program’s core services.
Part of it is that state and local programs continue to expand services, and they want to get the word out. As well they should. People who have child support debt or need employment assistance can see quick, meaningful benefits from these services, and programs should use any occasion they have to encourage participation.
You could also argue that the core elements of the child support program don’t exactly lend themselves to celebratory pomp.
Certainly no program should spend all of August delivering summonses with glittery cards that say, “Congratulations: You’re a Child’s Alleged Father!” Staff shouldn’t don their best clothes to ceremoniously remove money from one parent’s wallet and then speed across town in the Support Mobile to give it to another, let alone keep it to pay for TANF benefits.
Another reason we avoid talking about the actual work of child support is that most people in the program feel uncomfortable about the historically narrow focus on enforcement. A glance back at the first Child Support Awareness Month demonstrates shows just how reasonable a concern that is.
When President Clinton announced the event in August 1995, his comments drifted characteristically between apt turns of phrase (“Children are the best part of ourselves—the sum of our past and the promise of our future”), wonk-tinged boosterism (“I have made the reform of our Nation’s child support system one of the top priorities of my Administration”), and pathologizing cringe (“many parents in our country today deny the instinct to care for their children”). The child support program, as Clinton describes it, exists to save children from the parents who so blithely gave them life:
“By ensuring the enactment and implementation of my Administration’s strong child support enforcement proposals, we will send a clear signal to our citizens that they should not have children until they are prepared to care for them. Those who do bring children into the world must bear the responsibility of supporting them.”
Clinton even managed to drop deadbeat into a formal speech.
That last bit is a relic. In eight years of working in child support, I have never heard another child support professional use the d-word except as an example of how things were done in the Bad Old Days.
But as much as we try to distance ourselves from Clinton’s language and unsubtly paternalistic framing, the program he described remains essentially unchanged, the rules enacted at the end of the Obama administration injecting important elements of procedural fairness but not fundamentally changing the nature of our work.
How can we blame the public for not seeing how the program has changed when, mostly, it hasn’t?
Awareness Goes Both Ways
So here’s my suggestion for child support programs this August: dust off that active listening training and try to hear the story of child support that people outside the program tell.
If we weren’t still living through a pandemic, I would offer suggestions for informal focus groups and visits to court—ones that would require you to leave any queue-jumping credentials outside. But here are some things you can do while still sitting at your computer:
Read the results of a recent survey by Indiana’s child support program on public awareness of the program and the reasons that people do or do not choose to seek services
Go through, line by line, this report on the focus groups conducted by the marketing firm Ogilvy on behalf of California Child Support Services. Don’t skim it. And don’t rely on this excellent summary. Really dig into the details and see how perspectives on the program differ across lines that are far fuzzier than one that puts mothers on one side and fathers on the other.
Engage in social listening:
Search Reddit’s child support forum for cases related to your program to get a sense of how people are talking about their experiences and see how other people recommend dealing with the problems they face
Search the phrase “child support” on YouTube and compare views for videos with misleading or false information and ones with good information
Check out TikTok to see how child support figures into the cultural equation and how that shifts from one community to another
Look at recent research on child support in Google Scholar. While some of the results might come from names you recognize, much of it is produced by people who never seem to show up on child support conference panels. For example: this 2021 book by Oxford University Press, this fascinating article in a journal published by Cambridge University Press, and this chapter in an essay collection on the demography of people of African ancestry
Sign up for alerts from Google News for articles on child support. About 85 percent of what you’ll get is about celebrities. Some portion of the other 15 percent offers a valuable perspective on where the zeitgeist is at the moment, including in-depth reporting that is more likely to change public policy outcomes than anything we do in August to celebrate child support—or rather, the parts of child support that we feel most comfortable discussing
Throughout all of this, I would recommend against trying to set people straight. Don’t think in terms of solutions at all. Instead, just take notes on who is saying what—what position they’re coming from and what they’re saying. Don’t assume a causal relationship between the speaking position and the speech. Note each as its own bit of data.
The goal should be to ground yourself—and the ground is always messy.
Note: I am grateful to California’s Child Support Services team for making these reports available to the public.