Deadbeat Parents This is a term paper on the growing issues with deadbeat parents.

In the early nineteenth century, the courts in America that were dealing with the cases of divorce and marital breakdowns, found that the current laws don't provide for a support action. America had inherited many English laws in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and these laws found that the father had only a non-enforceable moral duty to support his children. This financial dependency theme reoccurred almost in every support case decided by the courts of America during the nineteenth century, primarily because newly divorced American mothers in nineteenth-century were almost always forced to live in poverty.

In 1950, Congress passed the first Federal child support enforcement legislation requiring State welfare agencies to notify appropriate law enforcement officials when it became necessary to provide aid to dependent children, who had been abandoned or deserted by a parent. The next big year for child support laws was 1984, when the Child Support Enforcement Amendments were established requiring major improvements in both state and local Enforcement programs.

English: Kitsap County Prosecutor Child Support Di...

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First, all States were required to develop mandatory income withholding procedures as well as expedited processes for establishing and enforcing support orders (such as income tax refund interceptions and property liens). In addition, states were allowed to report delinquent parents to consumer credit agencies. Legislation enacted in 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act also allowed for the creation of the New Hires database, which requires all employers to report information about newly hired employees. This allows child support enforcement officials to track down deadbeat parents, even across state lines to retrieve payments through income withholding. Still, today in 2009, too many children are still suffering the financial burden of not having enough of life's necessities.

If the children are not receiving financial...