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The latest Census data show a sharp decline in formal support agreements, from 64% of custodial mothers in 2003 to just 43% in 2022. When policymakers talk about child support, they often focus on poverty or delinquency. For decades that focus made sense. The modern child-support enforcement system was built to protect low-income families and ensure children received the resources they needed to survive. But middle-income mothers are just as critical to the conversation. In 2022, about half of U.S. adults (52%) lived in middle-income households, according to the Pew Research Center. For mothers earning between roughly $56,600 and $169,800 a year, that reality means juggling mortgages, college savings, and constant refreshes of their state’s payment portal. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 report Custodial Parents and Their Child Support, these mothers are neither destitute nor comfortably insulated. They are the backbone of the country’s care economy: financially independent on paper, yet still doing the emotional and administrative labor of enforcing fairness. Below is their story. Only 43% of custodial mothers have formal support agreements. The latest Census data show a sharp decline in formal support agreements, from 64% of custodial mothers in 2003 to just 43% in 2022. This occurred even as more women entered the workforce. From 2003 to 2022, slightly fewer women were working or even looking for work. Yet even during the 2020s (when many mothers stepped back from the workforce to care for children during the pandemic) far fewer had formal child-support agreements than mothers two decades earlier. MORE FOR YOU Misty L. Heggeness, a former principal economist at the U.S. Census Bureau and author of Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy, said in an interview: “Upon separation, if the parent taking primary custody of the children does not work outside the home, formal agreements are critically important because it is their only source of income and resources.” So why, at the very moment they needed financial predictability, were fewer women pursuing it? For many, the answer lies in the trade-offs: seeking a formal agreement can mean legal fees, emotional conflict, and months of paperwork with uncertain results. Middle-income mothers are still more likely than low-income peers to secure court-ordered arrangements. But they also face more modification battles, especially when both parents hold professional jobs and share custody. For higher-earning parents, it’s less about poverty and more about stability to alleviate stress. An Arizona mother of three who chose to remain anonymous for this article restarted her career after several years as a stay-at-home mother. She pays for health insurance for the children herself, but she and her ex split childcare and extracurricular expenses. She manages and pays upfront, expecting monthly reimbursement. Payments are consistently late, and her credit score has been negatively impacted. She has not hired an attorney due to the financial cost and potential conflict escalation with her ex: “Our conversations can become very sidetracked to emotionally draining arguments completely irrelevant to the issues at hand. I know this can be resolved with an attorney taking over, but there is the cost plus the anger on his part that will follow.” The average payment gap: roughly 36 percent. Across all income brackets in 2022, $29.9 billion in support was due, yet only $19.2 billion was actually received, leaving $12.5 billion unpaid. Mothers were supposed to receive about $6,458 a year in child support in 2022 but collected $4,157, depending on income and state enforcement. That 36 percent shortfall may not sound catastrophic, but adjusted for inflation today this represents a real loss of nearly $222 per household annually. Ask a middle-income mother what she could do with another $222 a month. She’ll tell you it could cover one to two afternoons of after-school care each week so she can stay later for meetings or take on stretch projects; cover groceries for the week; pay for a certification which boosts her long-term earning potential; or cover faster internet that makes remote work more efficient. When viewed through a macroeconomic lens, if that $12.5 billion had been paid to custodial parents and then circulated through local economies, total U.S. economic output would have increased by roughly $17.5 billion. Because that money never reached households, it represents an invisible tax. Not literally a government tax, but a productivity and consumption loss borne largely by mothers, who compensate for missing income with unpaid time or foregone work opportunities. Dr. Heather D. Hill is a professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy & Governance. Her research highlights how family policy shapes economic stability and impacts income tiers. Dr. Hill said in an interview that child support is especially important for middle- and upper-income working mothers compared with lower-income peers: “The child support they receive goes directly to them, rather than to the state, and they are more likely to have co-parents who can afford to pay child support.” Non-cash support is rising, masking the gap. 56 percent of custodial parents reported receiving at least one non-cash form of support: things like clothing, health-insurance premiums, or tuition reimbursements. While this shift might appear to modernize co-parenting, it undermines it. Economists at the Urban Institute note that when payments come in the form of direct purchases rather than cash, it can exacerbate existing financial challenges for mothers. For middle-income families, this shift can look equitable on paper. Texas mother and author Cheri Bergeron once co-owned a business with her ex. He received $4 million from that joint business and pays monthly child support. Her ex petitioned the court to have his child support lowered, but the petition was denied. Instead the court ordered him to assist with health insurance and to help pay for their child’s school tuition through fifth grade. Bergeron said in an interview the amount of child support is still less than her ex can afford and less than her child’s actual day-to-day living expenses. “My ex pays less than his fair share because I was a higher earner, even though he received millions in real estate from our joint business. The non-custodial parent should truly have to pay their share, and it should be adjusted up to keep pace with the cost of living. Currently, it's an arduous process to get child support recalculated, so most people don't do it.” Employers are paying a multi-million dollar time tax. Child support belongs within the larger care economy conversation, because employers are part of this story too. Employers like Bank of America that invest in childcare stipends, flexible scheduling, and dependent-care FSAs are already absorbing costs the child-support system fails to address. For companies, instability in child-support payments translates into lost productivity, lower retention, and stalled advancement for female talent. Middle-income mothers may decline overtime, skip travel, or pass on promotions that require flexibility. They lose income and productive hours tracking payments, filing enforcement claims, and budgeting around uncertainty. This time tax adds up to hundreds of millions of lost labor hours each year and billions in unrealized earnings. Each unpaid dollar is another crack in the care economy’s foundation. Over time, those cracks harden into gender inequality. According to Dr. Hill, raising children is treated as a private responsibility rather than an investment in society’s future. But child support is one of the few mechanisms that assigns an economic value to that labor by requiring the noncustodial parent to share in the cost. “For working single mothers, this is particularly important because they essentially have two jobs—one in the market and one at home,” she adds. Series Note: This feature continues in Part II which examines how policy reform could finally make the system fairer for families. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions
