Single Mothers and Their Child-Support Receipt: How Well Is Child-Support Enforcement Doing?

An increasingly large number of children are being raised by single parents. Child-support enforcement is aimed at mitigating the economic loss that these children face as a result of living with just one parent. Prior research has shown that early child-support reforms have succeeded in increasing child support, but recent reforms have not been examined and the critical role of welfare participation has been overlooked. Using 25 years of data from the March Current Population Survey augmented by child-support policies, this paper updates and expands our understanding of the impact of child-support enforcement on single mothers.