Deadbeat parents

It's amazing. Recently I saw a statistic on women and breast cancer. The statistic said that 1 out of 10 women will develop breast cancer. If you think about it, that means that almost everyone knows someone who suffers from breast cancer. It was along those lines that I started thinking about parents that do not pay child support-specifically, the "deadbeat" parent. These are not the occasional payment skippers - these are those parents whose arrearages are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The "deadbeat" parents are those parents who never made a payment or who maybe made one or two but never very many. It's odd, I think the statistic is maybe more frequent than the breast cancer one. I would say that 1 in 5 divorced parents is a deadbeat parent, but I might be being generous. So, many of us know one parent who is the victim of a "deadbeat" parent.

Believe it or not there are some answers. The answers come as legal advice for the most part, so seek legal help in your jurisdiction as each jurisdiction is different. The sad part is the answers will never be "sure-fire" solutions and it might years before any results can be achieved. Just do not give up.

It can be very disheartening even if you know where the parent is. If you do not the know the parent's location look at http://www.dollar4kids.com as there is a very helpful article and forms for tracking down a deadbeat parent.

When you know where the parent is there are some other solutions. Try some of these that might be application to your jurisdiction:

Revoke their Drivers license
Many jurisdictions allow that when child support is not paid and the amounts exceed a certain dollar amount, that non-payer can have their driver's license revoked. This can be particularly helpful when the parent relies on their license as part of their work. The goal here is to make the parent realize that the payment of child support is important. Most deadbeat parents feel that the child support is not important or that the payment is unnecessary. Revoking their license may make the payment seem more necessary - they face losing their complete livelihood. However, this course of action can have drawbacks. In many jurisdictions, the dollar amount owed is too high to help most people. Secondly, the rules are very restrictive and require the parent seeking the money to go through channels that many do not qualify for. That is, be on welfare and have the state child support to file.

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