SINGLE MOTHERS AND CHILD-SUPPORT - THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF CHILD-SUPPORT POLICY

In recent years, policy-makers have argued that one method of reducing welfare dependency is to toughen up child support enforcement. Yet ev ery government effort to do so has yielded meager results. Furthermore , experts predict that even when fully implemented, Congress's most re cent effort to fix this system, the Family Support Act of 1988, will d o little more to help most poor children to get child support from the ir fathers. These failures indicate that policy makers and social scie ntists must go much further in their efforts to understand how child s upport policy affects or fails to affect families. Data drawn from 214 AFDC mothers in four cities show that although welfare mothers are ma ndated by law to pursue child support in cooperation with their local Child Support Enforcement office, many mothers who want to remain on t he welfare rolls but do not want to reveal the father's identity engag e in what I call covert non-compliance-they pretend to comply, but in fact hide crucial identifying information from the authorities. These data show that those who engage in covert non-compliance have good rea son for doing so. In their negotiations with the welfare system, child support officials, and their absent partners, welfare-reliant mothers act strategically to maximize their family's potential economic and s ocial gains.