If Support Isn’t Paid, Kids Feel the Effects

Sandra and her three children may live in a five-bedroom, two-story San Fernando Valley home with a swimming pool, but their surroundings belie their finances.

They burn scrap lumber in the fireplace to keep warm, pick up staples each month from a food bank and sometimes rely on neighbors for gifts of shoes and clothing.

Charles, 17, skips a lot of activities that many take for granted, such as eating out with fellow high school band members after a game.

“We don’t get to do things we would if (Dad) had been paying (child support),” he says. “When we need new clothes or shoes, we usually have to wait a while.”

His mother, who asked that her real name not be used, says she once was the one who gave money to the needy. Then, four years ago, her businessman husband left home and, six months later, stopped paying monthly child support. He is more than $20,000 in debt to his children, according to court papers.

“People look at your house and say, ‘Gee, you’re rich.’ But you can’t eat a couch,” says Sandra, who earns $800 a month as a part-time secretary. “At the time he left, I was only making $350 a month. I was able to keep the electricity on and that was it.” The monthly mortgage payment on the house, purchased 17 years ago, is $300.

About two-thirds of the 12.4 million custodial parents nationwide, the vast majority of them women, receive no child support, Census Bureau data show. In Los Angeles County, the district attorney’s office enforces payment--via wage garnishment, property liens and other methods--in about 150,000 cases and is trying to find absent parents or otherwise begin enforcement in 330,000 more. And many cases never reach the office, prosecutors say.

Studies on the effects of non-payment, most of which have focused on families headed by single mothers, show that many youngsters are being deprived of the chance for a safe, healthy childhood.

“The obvious thing we know is that if fathers don’t pay, the children are poorer,” says Irv Garfinkel, a Columbia University professor and author of “Assuring Child Support,” a 1992 book.

“(In one-income families) there is a lot of shifting to worse neighborhoods and worse schools. That hurts children’s chances to succeed in life,” he says. “They are more likely to drop out of high school, less likely to go to or complete college, and a lot of that is due to the difference in income between one- and two-parent families.”

One-third of the 300 mothers in one 1992 study, for example, reported that their children lacked food, clothing or medical care during the first year after a marital breakup.

“Child support contributes about 10% of the total income of families headed by mothers,” Garfinkel says. “If all fathers paid what they should, according to current guidelines for child support, they would be paying almost four times as much. They should be paying $50 billion annually and they are paying between $13 and $15 billion.”

At least one parents’ advocacy group, however, believes non-payment figures are exaggerated. California statistics, for example, are based on court-ordered support payments filed with the state Department of Social Services, the Coalition of Parent Support says.

“There are lots of cases, where men pay regularly, that have no connection to the DSS,” says Dave Whitman of Bakersfield, state president of the coalition. “But they get very little press.”

Parents who do fail to pay inflict emotional and financial stress on the child, experts say.

“It creates a real sense of insecurity,” says Sondra Goldstein, a clinical psychologist in the San Fernando Valley. “They begin to worry about such basics as, will there be food for them to eat, will they be homeless on the street.

“The other (result) is that the child often personalizes the failure of child support and asks, ‘What’s wrong with me? Doesn’t my father feel I’m worth the support payment?’ ”

Experts who believe in the connection between child support and a child’s success are trying to determine if an emotional bond is even more important than money.

“(Studies have shown) a pretty strong relation between child-support payments and how well children are doing,” Garfinkel says. “The question is: Is that really the result of payments, or does it reflect a third variable like emotional commitment of fathers to children? Fathers paying more support might be more emotionally supportive of the children. (The studies) try to address that, but the results remain pretty crude.”

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Ponytailed KeVonna Scott, 9, has felt financial and emotional rejection. She is used to being turned down when she asks for new things. Her father owes $7,800 in back child support, court documents show, and that prevents her mother from buying non-essentials.

“She’ll say, ‘When can I have them?’ or ‘When you get paid, can I have this?’ ” says her mother, Loretha Green.

To make KeVonna feel better, her mother sometimes gives her $10. “But sometimes I have to borrow it back,” Green says. “She doesn’t let me forget it.”

Green earns $2,250 monthly as a clerk-typist for the city of Long Beach. Her monthly bills include $775 for rent, $260 for child care and $200 for clothing. She also manages to scrape together $40 for KeVonna’s dance lessons and $35 for cable TV each month. Occasionally, when the family needs to stretch the food budget, KeVonna and her sister go to their grandparents’ house for a meal.

The fourth-grader feels the financial pressure on her family.

“I feel sad because we don’t get very much help,” she says in the family’s two-bedroom Paramount townhouse. She’d like for the family “to get less bills.” KeVonna is also sad because she rarely sees her father, who has a job and until recently lived a few miles away, her mother says.

“She’ll get her hopes up to spend the day and, hopefully, the night with him. But he’ll get her at noon and be back here at 2 p.m. She’ll go up (in her room) and cry, but doesn’t want me to see her. . . . She loves him to death.”

Several years after KeVonna’s birth, Green married another man and had Dezyre, now 2. Although the couple is now separated, her husband still helps support both girls. KeVonna hopes he will help buy a computer like the one she’s been working on at school.

KeVonna won’t ask her father for the gift.

“I know he’s going to say he doesn’t have (the money) and can’t do it for me,” she says softly, swinging her feet as she sits on a chair. “I try to ask for less things.”

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Getting by on less quickly becomes the mission of broken families. Custodial parents often turn to myriad organizations for help not only in collecting child support but also in making ends meet.

Sandra, the San Fernando Valley mother of three, sought help at the Assn. for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES). She has become a master at ferreting out opportunities for low-income families.

Her son Gavin, 9, participates in a federally funded free-lunch program. Charles worked in the school cafeteria in exchange for free meals. Tammy, 13, recycles cans and baby-sits to pay for extras. (“I just go out and buy my own things,” she says.) And because Sandra qualifies under their low-income programs, the telephone and gas companies discount her bills.

But pinching every penny is tiresome.

“You hate to be in the situation where you’re always saying ‘no, we can’t afford it,’ ” when your children ask for something, Sandra says. “It’s becoming an obsession. You’re as sick of talking about it as they are of hearing it.”

Although the children know lack of money from their father contributes to their situation, they’re reluctant to complain and eager to maintain their relationship with him.

“I’ve gotten used to it,” Charles says. “I see him about every weekend.”

*

Margaret Magee hasn’t seen her father for four years.

When her parents divorced in 1985, her mother, Mary Ann, had a college degree and work experience--and help from her own mother, who provided day care. Because of those advantages, Margaret, now 15, says her father’s failure to pay court-ordered child support had little effect.

“I always had a nice home and loving mother and grandmother,” says Margaret, a poised sophomore at Woodbridge High School in Irvine.

Although the family had life’s necessities, such extras as summer camp or vacations were out.

“I never thought about asking my mom for those things, because I didn’t want to put her in that position (of having to say no),” Margaret says. “Summer camp wasn’t such a big thing to me. We never dwelled on what we didn’t have. It was what we did have that counted.”

Eventually, Magee, who relied on her mother for financial help, built a counseling business for laid-off workers. Now, she “does very well.”

The family lives in a comfortable two-bedroom apartment with country French furnishings and a white piano for Margaret’s lessons. But the question of how to pay for college looms. Margaret earns A’s and B’s and is considering a career in law, but a four-year school may not be affordable.

“I don’t think I can support two households,” Mary Ann says. “We’ll look at every avenue and every scholarship in the world to try to make it happen.”

She worries about college costs because her former husband has made only a fraction of his $875 monthly child-support payments and keeps his whereabouts unknown. According to court papers, he is more than $35,000 in arrears.

The father called Margaret for the first time in four years after the recent Northridge earthquake.

“He called out of the blue and he called twice,” Margaret says. “I think he heard about the earthquake and was concerned that I was all right.”

She sometimes misses having a father around--when friends mention going somewhere with their dads, for example. “I guess I would have liked him to contact me more,” Margaret says. “But it’s his decision and it’s his loss.

“I’ve never felt an absence because I’ve never known what two parents were like,” she adds. “His being around would have made our lives more comfortable, but we’re a lot stronger for having learned to cope. I have memories that are just as wonderful as someone with two parents. They’re just different.”