Editor’s Note: This week we start a new feature in the Jimplecute, “What Do You Think?.” In it, the J Spencer Foundation proposes questions relevant to today’s society. These questions are also asked, almost daily, by Sherry Spencer on FaceBook. If you have a response, send it to the Jimplecute, 115 N Polk St., Jefferson, TX 75657, jeffersonjimplecute@gmail.com, or comment on our website. We’ll run a selection of responses in the next edition.
What do you think?
Is child support fair to the father? Is this a just law?
If child support is a just law then the mother should not be able to use children as weapons or instruments of destruction against the father. If child support is for the best interest of the child
then we should look at the overall costs for the child if 50/50 custody is not available.
Child support is based on the monetary situation of the father minus his living expenses.
If both parents are unable to monetarily care for the child the custody goes to the mother automatically,
the father is not given consideration at all and asked to pay some amount. Even if parents are granted 50/50 custody the father is still made to pay child support.
Is child support in the best interest of the child or in the best interest of a non working mother?
Do you think social programs are the demise of the traditional family?
Yes and here is why, but what do you think? Should we be encouraging marriage before benefits or no benefits without marriage? What ever happened to shotgun weddings?
Family breakdown continues because this has become a new tradition. We teach our daughters that it is okay to have sex with men before marriage and rasie children without thier father’s. Society calls this independence.
We tell our daughters that a bad relationship means that men are not worthy of being fathers and that marriage is just a piece of paper. We teach our boys that men are not an important part of their children’s lives. We teach our sons to create a family but leave it behind if it gets hard or doesn’t suit you. We don’t teach our sons the true meaning of being a husband and father. If a young woman is pregnant out of wedlock then we simply agree that she must sign up for assistance be it SNAP, TANF (temporary assistance for needy families) cash assistance, medicaid,
Housing and social security disability benefits. If these items were not available to young single mothers would traditional families still exist? What happened to shotgun weddings?
“One contributor to family breakdown may have been welfare expansion. In the words of
Harvard’s Paul Peterson , “some programs actively discouraged marriage,” because “welfareassistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household… Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother’s economic well-being.” Infamous “man in the house” rules meant that welfare workers would randomly appear in homes to check and see if the mother was accurately reporting her family-status.
The benefits available were extremely generous. According to Peterson , it was “estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.” In today’s dollars, that’s over $90,000 per year in earnings.
That may be a reason why, in 1964, only 7% of American children were born out of wedlock, compared to 40% today . As Jason Riley has noted , “the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the home—and paid them well.”
Identifying welfare as a contributor—along with shifts in the labor market and de-industrialization—explains why fatherlessness has spread as it has.5
For example, racial differences in marriage rates may be largely due to racial income disparities, which lead to stiffer marriage penalties for black adults.6 And today, many means-tested programs7 reach into the working class and lower-middle-class, which corresponds with a decline in marriage among these groups.
In today’s America, four-in-10 families with children receive support from at least one
means-tested transfer program.9 One study found that almost a third of Americans said they personally know someone who chose not to marry due to the fear of losing a benefit.”
(credit https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-welfare-system and
https://www.heritage.org/welfare/commentary/married-the-welfare-state and
Questions are brought to you by The J. Spencer Foundation which is a non-profit organization that is a leader in providing help and hope to low to moderate income families and the working poor. We connect families with needed resources and self sufficiency programs and opportunities.