New Child Support Rules Mean Higher Costs for Some Parents

For the first 10 years that Beatrice Snider practiced family law in San Diego County--the late 1970s and early 1980s, when both divorce and inflation rates skyrocketed--it seemed that child support orders were among the few constants.

At $100 or $125 or $150 per child, regardless of either parent’s income or the true costs of raising children, court-ordered support payments were consistently low, Snider said recently.

“Inadequate support went to the lower-earning spouse,” she explained--typically a mother who had stayed home to raise the children and lacked the wherewithal to compete in the working world. “The impact on the children’s economic level was devastating.”

Now, that imbalance is being redressed. Under a mandate from the California Legislature to standardize child support payments, San Diego County courts--which entered more than 13,400 divorce decrees last year--within two months will begin using a set of guidelines that lawyers say will substantially increase most support orders.

Borrowed from Santa Clara County, where such standards have guided support decisions since 1978, the guidelines are meant to reflect the actual cost of raising children. Judges are not required to follow the guidelines when they make child-support orders, but they must explain for the record any orders that fall below the standards.

Though many attorneys worry the guidelines will rob judges of the discretion needed in complex divorce cases, a lawyers committee chaired by Snider recommended adoption of the guidelines last month.

Thomas Murphy, supervising domestic judge of the San Diego County Superior Court, expects the court to endorse them before July 1, when state law requires all counties to implement their own guidelines or operate under a statewide standard still being developed by the Judicial Council of California.

“What the data show is that child-support awards were just way below the cost of raising kids, and consequently, when a divorce came, the custodial parent was in big trouble,” said Palo Alto attorney George Norton, who helped develop the Santa Clara guidelines. “The schedule attempts to correct part of the problem. (It recognizes) that kids are a much bigger percentage of family costs than anybody thought.”

Because support orders now are so variable, there are no estimates of how much they will increase when the guidelines are applied.

What is assured, Norton said, is that the standards--in practice, a thick book of computer-generated tables--will follow a principle critics say has been absent from many support orders in the past: Each parent will contribute a fair share to a child’s support, based on the parent’s ability to pay and on the amount of time the child spends with the parent.

The process of setting the rec ommended payments consists of three steps:

- First, a pool of money for child care is established, reflecting what studies show to be the typical percentage of family income spent on children by families of various income levels.

For single-child families, for example, the proposed San Diego guidelines allocate 26% of family income to child care in families with annual incomes up to $20,000. The percentage drops to 20% for families with incomes of $20,000 to $60,000 and to 16% for incomes of $60,000 to $120,000.

The guidelines allocate a lesser percentage of income to the child-care pool for each additional child--again on the basis of sociological studies showing that larger families benefit from economies of scale.

- Next, each parent’s contribution to the pool is calculated on the basis of his or her earnings, adjusted for major payroll deductions and any alimony paid from one of the divorcing parents to the other.

- Finally, the amount each parent draws from the pool is based on the percentage of time each cares for the children under the dissolution decree.

Typically, lawyers say, the guidelines will require the higher-earning spouse with the smaller share of custodial time--usually the father--to make a monthly child-support payment to the lesser-earning spouse with the lion’s share of custody--usually the mother.

Take the example of a divorcing couple with two children and a gross annual income of $48,000. Assume that the father’s gross earnings are $3,000 per month and the mother earns $1,000 per month. If the court grants the mother a typical alimony payment of $400 and gives her custody of the children 80% of the time, the guidelines will require the father to pay about $400 per month in child support.

After taxes, the mother’s household of three would have about $1,550 to live on each month, while the father would be left with about $1,315--a reversal of the pattern identified in recent studies that found female-headed families often were being impoverished by divorce while non-custodial fathers’ living standards increased.

“It’s a rational scheme you can explain to your clients,” Norton said. “There’s a divisible pie, there’s only so much money, you’ve got to divide it some way, and this is the scheme the county has developed.”

Many divorce lawyers, however, say the guidelines disregard the idiosyncrasies that make each divorce unique. They predict that overworked judges will use the standards as an ironclad rule, not a helpful guide.

“The harm will be that the court will not look at each, individual case,” said San Diego attorney Bruce Beals, who served with Snider on the committee that recommended adoption of the guidelines. “Instead it will just say, ‘Based upon their income, this is what will be paid.’ ”

Blind reliance on the guidelines, Beals said, will ignore the non-custodial parent’s reasonable expenses--including contributions he may be making to a child’s special needs--and thus impose a hardship on the parent.

“It’s limiting those things that ought to persuade a court what an order should be,” added Martha Jones, chairwoman of the family law section of the San Diego County Bar Assn.

But advocates of the guidelines say judges in the past have paid too much attention to parents’ discretionary expenses and not enough to the children’s basic needs.

“The individual might have a very high income, but he goes into court and has all these expenses--a car payment, a boat payment, all these other things,” said Einar Oling, a deputy district attorney who specializes in child-support cases. “There was a lot of time spent in court just discussing the expenses and whether the expenses were reasonable or not.”

Supporters of the guidelines see the consistency they will bring to child-support orders as one of their major advantages, heightening the fairness of support decisions and creating an incentive for divorcing couples to settle their differences outside the county’s clogged family-law courtrooms.

“The lawyers want consistency,” Murphy said. “They want to be able to anticipate what the court will do. If they can, the odds are very good they’ll be able to settle a case. It’s when they don’t know what the court will do that they will, on occasion, litigate.”

Parents like predictability, too, said fathers’ rights advocate James Cook of Los Angeles, president of the Joint Custody Assn.

Without guidelines, “you’d go into court with tremendous apprehension about what could happen, because you just didn’t know,” said Cook, who has testified on support issues before Congress and the state legislature. “That inspired mothers to fight for all they could get and fathers to automatically be opposed, even though they were aware of their obligations.”

Murphy is hoping the number of litigated support cases will decline with the advent of guidelines. Currently, he said, three Superior Court judges are conducting about 10,000 of the emotionally charged hearings each year.

The 70% to 85% of support disputes already settled out-of-court--an additional 33,000 to 66,000 cases each year--also are likely to be influenced by the guidelines, pushing payments in those cases higher as well, Murphy estimated.

According to Oling, low-income parents already are experiencing some of the bonuses expected to result from the guidelines. The same law that requires the use of guidelines for all child-support cases by July 1 imposed a set of minimum support standards for divorces in low-income families last July, he explained.

The legislation, sponsored by Assemblyman Art Agnos (D-San Francisco), has boosted support payments to low-income custodial parents by about 5%, both in San Diego County and statewide, Oling said. At the same time, it has eliminated some of the discrepancies that ensued when judges had no standards to guide their support orders, he said.

“Two individuals could go into court and appear before two different judges on the same day and have basically the same income and the same expenses, and there’d be a huge difference in the amount of support (ordered),” Oling said. “There could be a difference of $100, depending on how the judge felt that day or whether he liked the individuals.”

The increase in court-ordered support payments expected to flow from the guidelines has some observers concerned that non-payment of support--already an epidemic--also will rise. Though no figures are collected for San Diego County, census statistics show that in 1983, the last year for which data are available, just under half the women granted child support received the payments they were due.

“We certainly see a lot of people now that aren’t paying child support,” Beals said. “Assuming the guidelines produce the result of even higher orders, the conclusion that will follow is that we’ll have fewer people complying with court orders than we do now.”

According to Norton, Santa Clara County has not suffered a decline in compliance during its experiment with guidelines. But Beals warned that the Northern California county may be more affluent than San Diego County, and thus is likely to have fewer people unable or unwilling to meet their support obligations.

Greater affluence in Santa Clara may also mean its guidelines are out of sync with living costs in San Diego, Beals said. When he tells divorcing parents in San Diego what their support payments would be under the proposed guidelines, both men and women are saying the payments are excessive, Beals said.

“So many people think child support is high in the first place,” he said. “Once they get an inkling of the type of money these guidelines will mandate, they’re going to be surprised, because these guidelines are high.”

More common among lawyers, is the belief that support orders have been too low--and that the guidelines are an important step toward correcting a longstanding inadequacy.

“Now we’re saying, ‘The child comes first,’ ” Oling said. “You brought this child into the world, and you have a moral, legal, and ethical responsibility to care for this child. How you manage expenses is your problem.”

HOW THE GUIDELINES WILL WORK FOR TWO-CHILDREN FAMILIES

ANNUAL GROSS GROSS MONTHLY INCOME GROSS MONTHLY INCOME GROSS MON FAMILY INCOME BEFORE DIVORCE ADJUSTED FOR AFTER SPOUSAL SUPPORT* NON- CUSTODIAL NON- CUSTODIAL NON- CUSTODIAL PARENT CUSTODIAL PARENT CUSTODIAL PARENT PARENT PARENT $24,000 $2,000 0 $1,500 $500 $1,083 $48,000 $3,000 $1,000 $2,600 $1,400 $1,708 $72,000 $4,200 $1,800 $3,900 $2,100 $2,412

ANNUAL GROSSTHLY INCOME CHILD SUPPORT FAMILY INCOME TAXES TO CUSTODIAL PARENT UNDER PROPOSED GUIDELINES CUSTODIAL PARENT $24,000 $487 $202 $48,000 $1,153 $393 $72,000 $1,584 $540

* Estimates based on non-mandatory spousal support guidelines SOURCE: Law office of Beatrice Snider